learning
rallain | August 18, 2009I wrote two letters (for two different classes). These are letters from the students of the near future to themselves in the present. this first one is for a non-majors lab. In this lab, I let them turn in "informal" lab reports that they can then use on the midterm and the final exam. The thing is that a lot of students don't even turn this in. Here is the letter:
Dear Past Me,
How are you? I know how you are because I am you and I remember this day. Really, you should be asking how I am.
I am not doing so well. I just took the midterm for the physics lab and it didn't go too well.…
rallain | July 25, 2009Here is an interesting article from Mashable: In the Future, the Cost of Education will be Zero
In the article, the author Josh makes the following points:
College is expensive and some people can't really afford it.
There is a growing trend in online universities. University of the People is one example.
Other universities are putting a lot of their material online - example MIT's OpenCourseWare project.
There are a growing number of free textbooks available online. I would like to point to an example of a free physics textbook.
Josh also points out that everyone should have a chance to go…
edyong | July 23, 2009From the scientists who brought you the infamous 'Halle Berry neuron' and the 'Jennifer Aniston neuron' come the 'Oprah Winfrey neuron' and the 'Saddam Hussein neuron'.
Four years ago, Rodrigo Quian Quiroga from Leicester University showed that single neurons in the brain react selectively to the faces of specific people, including celebrities like Halle Berry, Jennifer Aniston and Bill Clinton. Now, he's back, describing single neurons that respond selectively to the concept of Saddam Hussein or Oprah Winfrey. This time, Quiroga has found that these neurons work across different senses,…
edyong | July 15, 2009To me, and I suspect many readers, the quest for information can be an intensely rewarding experience. Discovering a previously elusive fact or soaking up a finely crafted argument can be as pleasurable as eating a fine meal when hungry or dousing a thirst with drink. This isn't just a fanciful analogy - a new study suggests that the same neurons that process the primitive physical rewards of food and water also signal the more abstract mental rewards of information.
Humans generally don't like being held in suspense when a big prize is on the horizon. If we get wind of a raise or a new job…
rallain | June 18, 2009Ok, this is a post about a particular curriculum, in particular Physics for Everyday Thinking. Let me start with a story.
Some time ago, our college of education was going through an NCATE accreditation review. For some reason, they needed a science course that was just for education majors. As it so happens, we (the department of Chemistry and Physics) already had a similar course that was in the catalog, but no longer being taught. So, we resurrected this course. I was in charge of the curriculum.
The course is a 5 contact hour (4 credit) course that counts for both a lecture and a lab…
rallain | June 13, 2009Our German friends let us borrow their son's bike after he got too big for it. I guess it will still be called a "bike" because it has two wheels.
See. No pedals. We don't need no stinkin pedals. Really, this is a great way for kids to learn how to ride. They just start off kind of walking while sitting on it. As they go faster, they kind of get the hang of how to not fall over. As I have said before, this is counter intuitive - if you are falling to the right, turn to the right.
I don't know if you can get a bike like this in the U.S., maybe you just need to find a German friend. If…
rallain | June 5, 2009In this WEEK in TECH episode 197 there was a pretty good discussion about education and the university system. In case you are not familiar with TWiT, it is a tech-based podcast with Leo Laporte (from the old Screen Savers show). If you want to listen to their discussion, it starts about half-way through the podcast. Here is what I find interesting - these are mostly tech-oriented people (there was one person in education) but they can clearly see some of the problems with the educational system. I think the following quote sums up their ideas pretty well (can't recall which twit said it…
rallain | June 1, 2009Notice how much I like the word "stuff". It really is a very useful word. I wonder if I did a wordle for this whole blog, would "stuff" be the biggest?
Anyway, I have been thinking about this popular Chronicle of Higher Education article Will Higher Education be the Next Bubble to Burst?. The basic argument the article makes is that higher education (especially private schools) are too expensive. It also talks about online universities such as Phoenix online and how they are becoming more popular. In all this "bursting bubble" discussion, there is an extremely important question:
What is…
rallain | May 25, 2009I was wondering around the blogosphere and read some stuff about introductory physics labs. In particular, I was looking at ZapperZ's Revamping Introductory Physics and Dr. Pion's Objectives for a Lab. Both of these are good posts. Here I thought I would add make take on this subject as I am picking the labs I will use for the summer session of introductory (algebra-based) physics labs.
When I first started teaching this lab, my goals for the course were a lot like Dr. Pions. Namely, I would like the students to improve in the following areas:
Critical thinking
Writing and communication…
rallain | May 4, 2009I got a great question (several actually) from the students participating in the Adopt a Physicist program. The question went something like this (not a direct quote):
Why is it that the stuff we study in physics class is 100 year old stuff?
I am sure the students phrased this better than that, but you get the idea. The first response is that most of the most of the topics covered in introductory physics is more like 300 years old (Newton). Needless, why do most course cover old topics?
First, to answer this question I would ask the following:
What is the purpose (goal) of the introductory…
rallain | April 7, 2009Dan Meyer at dy/dan just posted about teacher-student analogies. His analogy is that the student is like a weight lifter and the teacher is the spotter. I like this. It is similar to my usual analogy that the teacher is like a trainer and the student doing some exercise. Another analogy I often use is a person learning to ride a bike. The learner is the one doing stuff, not the "helper" or "facilitator". I am really not sure what to call the helping person. Maybe the Yoda would be a good term. I like that.
Look at a person learning to ride a bike (btw, here are my tips for learning to…
rallain | March 20, 2009So, I was in the student computer lab helping a student with a numerical calculation. I couldn't help notice the student next to me was registering for classes. Here is here strategy:
Look at required courses.
Check available classes.
Check ratemyprofessor.com.
Re-check available classes.
Repeat.
So? What is wrong with this? I see a couple of problems. First is the reliability of ratemyprofessor (RMP). I have not looked at my ratings on this site in a long long time, but I am sure they are not accurate. My favorite RMP comment: Dr. Allain teaches astronomy 101 like it was a 400 level…
rallain | February 25, 2009I overheard this high school student complaining about a teacher. Here is essentially what she said (about a class her friend is in):
"This teacher is crazy. He said we have a test the next day and he gave them a study guide. But he didn't give the answers to the study guide. My friend and her mom stayed up till midnight looking up the answers on google."
I am pretty sure this was regarding a math class. So, what is the problem? I think there are a couple, but it mainly has to do with the nature of assessment. What is the point of assessing if students know (memorize temporarily) stuff…
rallain | February 19, 2009I saw this some time ago, probably in The Teaching Professor online magazine thingy. The basic idea is to leave your class alone when they are having a discussion. I have done this a couple of times. Yesterday was the first time this semester. Here is the deal. In this class (Physics for Elementary Education Majors), they collect evidence and build models. For that day, the experiments were giving students evidence about what happens to a fan cart when the strength of the fan changes and what happens when the mass of the cart changes.
When it came time to discuss the ideas, I made sure…
edyong | February 17, 2009Babies can say volume without saying a single word. They can wave good-bye, point at things to indicate an interest or shake their heads to mean "No". These gestures may be very simple, but they are a sign of things to come. Year-old toddlers who use more gestures tend to have more expansive vocabularies several years later. And this link between early gesturing and future linguistic ability may partially explain by children from poorer families tend to have smaller vocabularies than those from richer ones.
Vocabulary size tallies strongly with a child's academic success, so it's striking…
edyong | January 30, 2009On Tuesday, I wrote a short essay on the rightful place of science in our society. As part of it, I argued that scientific knowledge is distinct from the scientific method - the latter gives people the tools with which to acquire the former. I also briefly argued that modern science education (at least in the UK) focuses too much on the knowledge and too little on the method. It is so blindsided by checklists of facts that it fails to instil the inquisitiveness, scepticism, critical thinking and respect for evidence that good science entails. Simply inhaling pieces of information won't get…
rallain | January 27, 2009Should you grade on a curve or not? If you are student, the answer is clear: go by whatever the instructor does. Otherwise, you have a choice. I don't like to tell other instructors or faculty what to do because I respect their freedom. For my classes, there is no curve. Why? Well, the question really is: "why grade on a curve?" I don't know the exact reason for particular instructors, but I can come up with some possible reasons.
Curve for competition
This is a very common curving reason. The basic idea is that the class is a competition between the students. The strong survive.…
sporte | January 19, 2009One of the newfangled ideas that's popped up in education in the past few years has been notion that more interactive methods of teaching will lead to better results.
There's an appealing logic to this notion.
Figure 1. A traditional lecture may not be the ideal way to transfer information.
Technorati Tags: education, active learning, clickers
To quote Eric Mazur (1) quoting D. Huff (2):
I once heard someone describe the lecture method as a process whereby the lecture notes of the instructor get transferred to the notebooks of students without passing through the brains of either…
rallain | January 12, 2009I am getting ready for classes. One class I am teaching is a physics course for elementary education majors. I really enjoy this class. There is hardly any math and the students learn by doing some experiments and then creating models. These models are then shared and discussed among the class. The basic points of the class are:
Help students learn the nature of science by doing sciency things.
Learn some science content by doing stuff (instead of listening to me talk about stuff)
Learn about how to teach science in elementary schools.
Explore the nature of learning.
I didn't really make…
rallain | January 6, 2009The Teaching Professor has a short note about students cramming for exams. The article talks about how you should deal with students cramming for exams. It includes the correct answer: you shouldn't do anything accept maybe change your tests.
What is the purpose of a test? It is some way to evaluate what a student has mastered. If a student can "master" something by spending a couple of hours right before the exam, is it really worth mastering? The real problem is that many tests seem to focus on recall type information. These are (in my humble opinion) mostly pointless. What does it…