Dr. Adam Moser: Research and Teaching

Boston University posted the following video interviewing students about how hard it is to get an A.  I love that one of the students is a former student of mine and comments about how you really have to do your work and do it right.  The students reflect about how grades at BU are tough to get and how that affects them.

Boston University – YouSpeak

Boston University is one of the toughest schools to get an A at based on a CBS article (also see this).  I can’t speak for all the departments (I can’t really speak for mine either), but the chemistry department is a tough place to get an A.  I often write recommendation letters for students and have to explain that a B grade from us is likely an A grade in most anywhere else.  I don’t feel BU has grade deflation either, assuming you adhere to the idea that C means average understanding.

While I think it is VERY important for grades to have meaning, it really is a double edged sword for a pre-med who has to compete against someone who is at a school with grade inflation.  We really need to move to a mechanism where grades are accompanied with information about how the student compares to others in the class and historically.

UPDATE – (5/31/2012) The Boston Globe had an article back in 2010 entitled “Praising the low grade for a harder course“  Not only should A mean something, but we shouldn’t be upset when a student gets a B or a C.  Here is a great quotation from the article.

Year after year, I’m seeing more “perfect’’ 4.0 grade point averages, and plenty just short of the 4.0 mark. To be clear, that means getting a grade of A or close to it in every course a student takes, regardless of his or her major. I don’t recall in my college days having peers with such intellectual multi-dexterity, but that was ages ago. Are today’s undergraduates smarter, harder working, and more talented than we were back then?

We need to ratchet down the arms race for having the highest GPA, so students are more willing to take a tougher course.

The Boston Globe had the following article (copied here in part to remove the excess school spirit) written by a former Harvard University President titled “Harvard can provide educational leadership.”

TWO GREAT problems currently beset American higher education. First, while the percentage of high school seniors enrolling in college has increased over the last 30 years, the percentage who graduate has not, stunting the opportunities of many young people and depriving the economy of skills it needs in order to prosper. Second, most students graduate having made only modest progress in fundamental competencies, such as critical thinking, perhaps because they are spending 40 percent less time studying than their predecessors several decades ago.

… But Harvard has a great opportunity to lead in reforming undergraduate education to engage students more fully and help them develop to the full extent of their abilities. Three improvements are needed:

â–  Faculty members should lecture less and experiment with new, more active methods of instruction.

â–  The faculty should participate in developing reliable methods of assessing student progress to determine which forms of instruction are most effective in helping students learn.

â–  Departments need to help restructure graduate education to acquaint future faculty with what is becoming known about how students learn, what methods of instruction are most successful, and how technology can be used to engage student interest and help them progress.

Already, universities are starting to introduce such reforms. Lecturing is gradually giving way to more active methods of teaching. Computers are beginning to be used not just to facilitate communication between students and faculty but to improve learning. A few departments are experimenting with new ways to prepare graduate students better for their role as teachers.

But major universities have not played a prominent part in these efforts. They feel little pressure to do so, since they attract far more students than they can accommodate. Yet their participation is critical, since their example has such a powerful effect on hundreds of other colleges.

…

This morning on WBUR (Boston’s NPR affiliate) ran a segment in the back-to-school theme titled “Think You’re An Auditory Or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It’s Unlikely”.  The whole audio piece is worth a read, but here is a clip.

Psychologist Dan Willingham at the University of Virginia, who studies how our brains learn, says teachers should not tailor instruction to different kinds of learners. He says we’re on more equal footing than we may think when it comes to how our brains learn. And it’s a mistake to assume students will respond and remember information better depending on how it’s presented.  For example, if a teacher believes a student to be a visual learner, he or she might introduce the concept of addition using pictures or groups of objects, assuming that child will learn better with the pictures than by simply “listening” to a lesson about addition.

In fact, an entire industry has sprouted based on learning styles. There are workshops for teachers, products targeted at different learning styles and some schools that even evaluate students based on this theory.

This prompted Doug Rohrer, a psychologist at the University of South Florida, to look more closely at the learning style theory.

When he reviewed studies of learning styles, he found no scientific evidence backing up the idea. “We have not found evidence from a randomized control trial supporting any of these,” he says, “and until such evidence exists, we don’t recommend that they be used.”

Willingham suggests it might be more useful to figure out similarities in how our brains learn, rather than differences. And, in that case, he says, there’s a lot of common ground. For example, variety. “Mixing things up is something we know is scientifically supported as something that boosts attention,” he says, adding that studies show that when students pay closer attention, they learn better.

And recent studies find that our brains retain information better when we spread learning over a longer period of time, say months or even a year, versus cramming it into a few days or weeks. Rohrer and colleagues nationwide are currently researching what teaching methods work best for all students, but only using the evidence.

I think this is very interesting because I’ve used the argument of learning styles before.  Then again it is has been my experience that people are horrible at understanding themselves.  Maybe instead of learning styles, I might have said learning preferences.  The idea being students might feel more comfortable learning in a particular way, which may make them more receptive.  The idea of providing material through lots of media seems even more appealing now because it requires the students to come out of their comfort zone.  I also appreciate the nod to retention and the importance of spreading learning out.

I think we often forget how much influence forgetting has on learning.  Learning isn’t binary between knowing and not knowing.  Learning is part levels of understanding and how well we retain it.  I’m not a neurobiologist, but it seems to me learning likely has something to do with strengthening the connection between neurons.  Its a biological process, and biological processes take time.  Because of this it takes time to learn information and it can be forgotten if it goes unused.

A recent article in Journal of Chemical Education, “Decay of Student Knowledge in Chemistry“, tried to quantify how quickly the information is lost in general chemistry after the assessment.  They suggest that a spiral approach to teaching helps slow knowledge decay.  This is interesting because I think many times courses are taught in a linear format.  You learn one skill/concept, which lets you move to the next/skill concept, etc.  You do reuse some ideas over and over, which keeps them fresh in your mind, but many skills are seen only once or twice.

Is it truly that surprising students don’t remember basic math skills, when they haven’t had to use them for years?  I think we underestimate sometimes how quickly we lose knowledge when it goes unused.  With this in mind, educators need to be sensitive to the fact students might not retain every bit of information in those prerequisite classes and not even all the ideas you taught them last week.  That is unless you consistently connect the topics and force students to reuse skills throughout a course.

I suppose to summarize, students need to realize that learning is not instantaneous and faculty need to keep in mind that unused knowledge is often forgotten.

The video below was shown to me a couple of years ago (or see part 1 and part 2 of a similar video).  I think it was originally made in 2008, so some of the data is already outdated.  I’m not sure how accurate some of the data is, but it seems to me the theme of the video is likely correct.  There is a lot going on in the world and it is changing at an increasing rate.

One of the ideas that really struck me is the idea that we are training our students for jobs that don’t exist yet.  I disagree that most of what we teach is outdated, but I think that little of what we teach is at the edge of our fields.  We are rarely teaching the skills that are being used in the workplace.  Mostly we are teaching background and fundamentals, so that the students will understand the concepts they are using when the move on.  I am not advocating moving away from this and having education becoming more specific and technical, but I think we should be keep in mind what our goals should be.  A recent article in the New York Times titled “Education Needs a Digital Upgrade” advocates updating the classroom using our knowledge of what life is like (and what we predict it will be like) to design our classrooms.

It would be worth our time to decide what skills are important for our students to come away with and prioritize them some.  Is balancing a chemical reaction more or less important than them learning how to work in teams on multipart problems?  Is calculating an equilibrium constant more or less important than the students learning how to rationalize a problem they haven’t seen before?  How much detail and how much thinking?

Update (1/31/2012) Check out What Should Students Be Studying Now To Prepare For 10 Years From Now?  We have to be thinking long term about what our students will be asked to do in their careers and prepare them for it.

Update (5/31/2012) “The End of Publishing. Or is it?“  Is another cool video that talks about the end of published books.  Its fun and might make you think a little bit about current culture.

Update (6/20/2012) “You are Not Special” is a commencement speech that first highlights what things don’t make you special, then leads to what you can strive to be great.  Funny and might just be meaningful to you.

Update (8/30/2012) Check out this Did You Know? 4.0

A recent article in the Boston Globe summarized an interesting project call Khan Academy (also see the Ted Talk about it here). It started off as a uncle helping his nephew out with math homework by making short YouTube videos of various math concepts.  Now it has grown into a huge library of short videos on topics in math, science, and humanities.  The list of 100 chemistry videos is impressive.  Videos seem to be around 10min long, some teaching topics and others showing example problems.

What I love about this idea is the ability for a student to view exactly the topic they want to learn about, whenever they want to view it, and stop/start/rewind/pause their way through it.  This is similar to online courses that have lecture video for the students to view, but these are short and organized by topic.  I’d love to see an experiment where the same course was taught with online videos, with online videos and a lecture, and just lecture with no videos.  I wonder how much the students would use the videos in conjunction with other support.  Either way this is a cool resource that is free for anyone to use.

EDIT: Cool video of a google hangout with Khan.

UPDATE (7/12/2012) The trouble with Khan Academy.

N.Y. Times posted a very interesting article about grade inflation, “A History of College Grade Inflation”.

The graph tells the tale fairly well.  A’s are on the rise and C’s are on the decline.  What does “A” mean if 40% of the students are achieving it.  What does “C” mean if only 15% of the students are achieving it.  Add to this studies that show students are studying less on average than they were 50 years ago.

The article mentions the the “consumer-based” institution as a player in this inflation and I’m sure it has made an impact, but I’ve seen plenty of missed expectations as well.  Students come to college having received high marks for minimal work and creativity.  It isn’t a wonder their expectations for college are skewed.  A sense of entitlement that work should equal a good grade, even if mastery of the material isn’t there.  They don’t just take the grade they are given and choose to work harder.  They fight, argue, whine, and cry to change the outcome.  The faculty I’ve observed range from very concerned about their students to almost completely uninterested, but few of them seem particularly interested in fighting back grade inflation.  No wonder given the unbelievable hassle it would be.  It would take a complete institutional initiative to really fight grade inflation (e.g. Yale).  And even then you have the issue of cross-institution comparison.

Another thought this article had me come back to is the goal of the assessment.  A  solid, generic answer is feedback for the student and faculty, but that is generally unsatisfying to me because it really depends on how you do the assessment.  Repetition of problems previously given doesn’t constitute much learning, but can give a fair bell curve of scores probably around 80 average.  This isn’t really testing mastery of the material though.  So you mix in a couple of good synthesis problems or even get crazy and ask some questions that require the students to extend their knowledge.  You get a bit more information about what your top students are capable of and you shift down the average.  My preference is a few repetition problems and lots of synthesis and extension.  The average is certainly low, but the information the students and you receive is much useful.  The downside is you have to translate how their scores become letter grades and when the students see an average score of 43 out of 100, they lose their minds.  Its all about managing expectations I suppose, though I’d like to see expectations higher.

UPDATE (8/16/2011) – Chronicles of Higher Education published “Justify Every A” which teachers using professional evaluators to give out grades to fight grade inflation.  It opens up the class because now the teacher is on the students side against the evaluation, instead of the students feeling against the teacher because they are assessing them.  In a system where “A” is the most common grade, this idea doesn’t sound crazy.

UPDATE (10/10/2011) – Science jumped on this idea in a recent article “Easy A” mentions how “A” is now the most common grade while other academic measures stay steady or decline.

UPDATE (5/31/2012) – Washington Post article on grade inflation sent me to http://gradeinflation.com/ which has some actual data on grade inflation.  I love data.

UPDATE (5/31/2012) – Just because it happened at my Ph.D. institution, check out “At [University of Minnesota], concern grows that ‘A’ stands for average” or “Too Many A’s? U. of Minnesota Professor’s Plan Would Give Grades More Context“.  Dr. Cramer was on my thesis committee and taught one of my grad classes.  He is brilliant and cares about education.  The idea for revised transcripts is a good one, my question is what is the “right” way?

UPDATE (8/20/2012) – A student sues for the right to get into law school arguing his lower GPA from 1979 is better than the new required GPA because of grade inflation.

“Any physics professor who thinks that lecturing to first-year students is the best way to teach them about electromagnetic waves can stop reading this item. For everybody else, however, listen up: A new study shows that students learn much better through an active, iterative process that involves working through their misconceptions with fellow students and getting immediate feedback from the instructor.”

Nobel prize winner in physics, Dr. Carl Wieman recently published an article in Science (10.1126/science.1201783) titled “Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class” that has gotten some serious press, including the quotation above.  Dr. Wieman is a big proponent of active engagement in class.  Dr. Wieman’s team reports that students in an introductory college physics course did especially well on an exam after attending experimental, collaborative classes during the 12th week of the course. By contrast, students taking the same course from another instructor — who did not use the experimental approach and continued with lectures as usual — scored much lower on the same exam.

I’m already a convert to the engaged learning process that gets the students doing more than writing down everything the lecturer says and writes.  What I think is interesting is that this seems like a fairly obvious experiment and it is only being done now.  Also, why does it always seem physics is leading the way in science education development?

UPDATE (3/26/2012) – John Hopkins aims to reform early science classes with active learning techniques.

UPDATE (5/31/2012)- “Warning: Flipping Your Classroom May Lead to Increased Student Understanding” – A useful article because it actually explains what flipping a classroom means and how to engage students.  Again more backup on why univocal lecture is NOT the most effective teaching style.

UPDATE (12/20/2012) – The American Chemical Society in the Journal of Chemical Education just covered the NRC’s report that Research-based instruction is more effective than traditional lecture.

UPDATE (6/20/2013) – Dr Wieman is now fighting cancer, but still working toward convincing the science world that there are better (research-based) methods of teaching.  Chronicles did an update on his work.  While is Executive Order proposal might be extreme, I feel like this guy at least is thinking about the problem correctly.

Being a good teacher is something to be proud of and in my experience very difficult.  Figuring out what someone else doesn’t know and finding a way to get that information into their head in a lasting, useful way is a challenge.  Luckily, there are lots of people out their trying to do the same thing.

So much stuff comes by in Chronicles of Higher Education, Journal of Chemical Education, NY Times Education, and in my time with students that I can’t keep track of it all.  Hopefully this blog will be a place to keep track of all the interesting teaching research and experiences I come across.