Clickers in Mind

Adam Carle Department of Psychology adam.carle@unf.edu

Lately, you may have noticed that UNF has begun “clicking” its way into the new century. Students use clickers (also known as classroom response systems) to answer a professor’s questions and the clicker system provides the professor with real time feedback about the class’ answers. Theoretically, these systems allow students to more fully engage with the material and learn better, especially in large classes. As a result of this theory, UNF and its students have invested substantial resources in clickers. For example, during Spring 2007, 1969 students used clickers. The clickers cost students $20 and students spend $13 each semester to register the clickers. So, in Spring 2007 students spent approximately $65,000 on clickers at UNF.

Astoundingly, little to no research has examined whether students actually learn better when using clickers! Rest assured, research has shown that students and professors both enjoy using clickers and students indicate that they learn better with clickers. But, until recently, no studies directly assessed whether students demonstrated higher achievement when using clickers. To cut a long story short, Mayer and colleagues (2009) recently addressed this problem. They compared college students in a class where students used clickers to answer 2 to 4 questions per lecture to two other groups of students, students in a class without clickers and students in a class without questions. Though their design limits strong causal conclusions, their results showed that students in the question-clicker class scored significantly higher on course exams than students in the other classes. Great news, considering we’ve already asked students to spend a tremendous amount of money on these systems (and UNF has too)

However, like most educational tools, the tool’s effectiveness depends on informed implementation. In the same way that simply handing students a book (or a computer for that matter) won’t directly lead to learning, simply handing students clickers won’t necessarily result in increased learning. Mayer et al. (2009) based their technique on a large educational literature. They built on active and generative learning methods that show that students learn better if they: answer conceptual questions while learning, practice taking tests, and engage in self-explanation while learning. Thus, they had all students in the clicker-question classroom respond to questions. Then, one student explained their answer to the class. Finally, the professor explained how to answer the question, and why.

What does this mean for you and your students? It means a fledgling research literature has begun to demonstrate that clickers can lead to increased learning. It means that you might boost your students’ achievement using clickers if you adopt clickers carefully. You should build on you and your course’s strengths and incorporate clickers in a way that fosters generative and active learning. You should develop your clicker use with the educational literature in mind and utilize evidence-based teaching practices. Finally, you should collect data. See how (or if) your class’ averages change across time as you implement the clicker system. Base your teaching practices on evidence. After all, you wouldn’t buy a $65,000 car without data, or would you?

Mayer, R. E., Stull, A., DeLeeuw, K., Almeroth, K., Bimber, B., Chun, D., Bulger, M., Campbell, J., Knight, A., & Zhang, H., (2009). Clickers in college classrooms: Fostering learning with questioning methods in large lecture classes. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 34, 51-57.

Research in Mind

Adam Carle Department of Psychology adam.carle@unf.edu

Have you ever tried to define research? As UNF continues to grow and change, research has become an increasingly discussed aspect of UNF’s institutional setting. Our mission statement notes that we “support and recognize research and creative endeavor as essential university functions.” And, heck, I’m told it’s part of our responsibility as faculty members to conduct research. Given that I regularly conduct research, I thought it might be fun to try and define research. I thought I’d try and define research in a way that encompassed as many of the academic fields and sciences as possible. It turns out, I’m having an awfully hard time! In this installment of the blog, I thought I’d ask for your help, and, hopefully, generate some discussion. Please, read my (bad) attempt at defining research below. Then, tell me what you think. What does it miss? What does it overstate? How does it relate to what you do (or don’t do) here at UNF? I can’t wait to read what you have to say.

Research, broadly defined, encompasses systematic and organized approaches to accurately describe, predict, and understand the heterogeneous aspects of existence. These efforts include basic and/or applied settings, quantitative and/or qualitative efforts, and cover the vast array of academic disciplines. Regardless of field, these endeavors use a set of planned procedures to examine their topic and arrive at accurate conclusions.

Programmatic research differs in that it typically seeks to break a large research topic into smaller, more manageable pieces. This often allows more stringent control and more detailed, fine grained analyses. Programmatic research addresses each piece sequentially in an effort to build an encompassing and coherent picture from the smaller studies’ findings. Programmatic research allows investigators to incorporate their findings into the discipline’s field at large and build upon others’ research. Programs of research support sustained, long term, focused efforts.

Sponsored research refers to research funded by an external research organization. Because of its nature, programmatic research often needs material resources an investigator or institution cannot easily or continuously supply. Relatedly, sponsors may lack sufficient human capital (knowledge or otherwise). As a result, sponsors, investigators, and investigator’s institutions enter into partnerships to overcome these boundaries. Research and sponsorship often go hand in hand and sponsorship suggests that a topic and method have achieved recognition, especially when the funding process includes peer review. Nevertheless, not all research needs funding to proceed, nor must funding exist to consider an endeavor as research. As a result, though investigators often require sponsorship to conduct research, sponsorship itself proves neither necessary or sufficient as a definition of research.

A Crisis of Ignorance

Carolyn Williams Department of History cwilliam@unf.edu

When it began to materialize for me, the enormity of the economic problem we face, the first thoughts that popped into my head were “greed” and “lack of oversight.” Now that we have been bombarded with words and images of the scramble for a solution, the other phrase that keep rolling around in my head is “crisis of ignorance.” From the top down, it seems that no one really knows what is going on or what to do.

So maybe this is the big “wake up call” for us to do what the founders urged, that is, to be informed and engaged citizens. If all of us took more time to understand economic issues from our daily lives to the big engine that drives the nation, we would make better decisions about our personal finances, have a real comprehension of government policies, etc., ask pointed questions, demand clear and substantive answers and hold our representatives to greater accountability.

As we try to avoid a catastrophe, let’s follow the advice of the Founding Fathers-eternal vigilance-to make sure our rights to life, liberty and property are preserved and protected. Faculty and others with knowledge, insight and expertise here at the university can contribute to creating a new vigilant citizenry that can be of use to the present crisis and help prevent future disasters.

Answers In Mind

Adam Carle Department of Psychology adam.carle@unf.edu

Do you believe in common knowledge? I’m beginning to feel that I don’t. It seems a wealth of common knowledge about test taking exists, but the educational psychologist in me knows that too little research has empirically examined much of the common lore. As we enter the final week of summer session, I’m sure a few of our students have tests on their mind. As they study and prepare, many of our students ask us for advice.

“How should I study for the final?” (Don’t cram, space your studying)

“How many questions will it have?” (Enough to reliably and validly measure your achievement)

“Do you have specific advice on how to take the final?” (?)

Common testing lore (among students and professors) would have you answer that last one something like, “Don’t change your answer on multiple choice tests. Stick with your initial impression.” But, recently, some investigators decided to put this advice to the test. It turns out that this is ill founded advice. In a series of elegant experiments, Kruger, Wirtz, and Miller (2005) showed that, on average, students who changed their answers on tests faired no worse than if they’d kept their initial answers. In fact, on average, switched answers (when students doubted their initial answer) lead to better scores on average. This goes against what many of us have learned and what many of us believe we’ve experienced.

How can this happen? Relatively simply. Kruger, et al. suggest (and go on to show) that students more easily remember times when they changed a correct answer to an incorrect answer. As a result, they overestimate the number of times this occurs. They often don’t notice when changing an answer led to a correct response. Why should they? Most of us attend more strongly to negative feedback. Students do too. Because students painfully feel switches to wrong answers, students quickly and easily remember their occurrence. They overestimate their prevalence; misestimate their own experience; and subsequently choose a poor test taking strategy.

What can we do about this? The obvious. We can start telling our students that, when they doubt their answer, they should change it. We can start by telling our students that their initial impression may be wrong. We can start giving our students empirically grounded advice. Unfortunately, Kruger, et al. also showed that students didn’t want to change their test taking strategy, even when professors explicitly suggested the better strategy (switch) and even when professors showed students evidence for switching’s effectiveness. Kruger, et al. suggest that, in the end, students find a life’s worth of misleading personal experience hard to conquer.

However, I’m left wondering. What if all their professors gave this advice, not just one? What if they gave it regularly, not just once? What might happen then? Let’s find out.

Kruger, J., Wirtz, D., & Miller, D. T. (2005). Counterfactual thinking and the first instinct fallacy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 725–735.

Communication in Mind

Adam Carle Department of Psychology adam.carle@unf.edu

Did you hear the one about the two professors who walked into a bar? The third one ducked…. I know. I know. I can hear you groaning now. Silly me. I love that joke. But, I didn’t write it for that reason alone (though I might do something like that). Rather, I wrote it to make a point. Did you know I had started a joke? If so, how? If not, did you find yourself suddenly concerned for my welfare? More so than usual? (Did you know that I meant that as a joke?)

Why should you care? Well, it turns out, we humans don’t communicate nearly as well as we think we do. In a series of intriguing experiments, Justin Kruger and his colleagues (2005) explored some of the limits of our communicative abilities. Generally, we have a tendency to overestimate the extent to which people understand our expressions and we simultaneously have a tendency to overestimate our ability to understand others’ communications. They found that this problem becomes particularly pronounced across email communications, i.e., communication where we don't see the other person. To simplify, they found that senders well overestimated the extent to which recipients would realize they’d written a joke in an email. And, on average, recipients well overestimated their ability to perceive jokes and humor sent via email. Thus, people often failed to realize that someone had sent them a joke. Likewise, people often failed to realize that the implicit joviality of their email had not translated across the electrical medium. Jokes and sarcasm met in one nasty accidental brawl.

So, when communicating via email, we don’t do so well. We think people know what we mean and we think we know what other people mean. And, here comes the kicker, we respond in kind. We get angry because a colleague, friend, or professor has sent us this ridiculously mean or sarcastic email, when in reality we never realize they’d intended their statement as a joke or gentle prod. Moreover, the colleague, friend, or professor has no idea that we, the student perhaps, missed their joke and that we’ve responded angrily because we misinterpreted their email.

What does this mean for you? As modern academics we do a tremendous amount of communication without direct interaction. As we move through the summer months, many of us will probably communicate with our peers and students via email more often than usual. Work like Kruger’s suggests that we regularly fail to convey and perceive the jovial nature of communication. We know we’ve told a joke. Surely the recipient knows it too. Moreover, it shows we frequently misinterpret others’ attitudes and emotions that they express to us via email and that we rarely realize we’ve misinterpreted the communication. We know how we would feel if we wrote that; they must feel the same way too. All this work suggests that we should work harder to explicitly state the nature of our communications. When we make a joke, we should preface our statement with a disclaimer noting as much. Moreover, when we receive ‘one of those’ emails from students and we think, ‘they can’t possibly mean that seriously,’ perhaps they don’t! We should ask others what they meant. We should work to clarify our communications as much as possible. And, I suggest, we should cut each other a little slack. We should assume the best in our colleagues and students. We should suspect that the angry note or stunningly awkward statement reflects the inadequate medium of email as communication rather than attributing it to a lack of character on the other’s part. After all, someone needs to pick us up after we walk into that bar....

Kruger, J., Epley, N., Parker, J. & Ng, Z. (2005). Egocentrism Over E-Mail: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 925–936.

The “Good” Teacher

Dan Richard Office of Faculty Enhancement drichard@unf.edu

I have never been one for labels. Something just feels wrong about putting a label on someone, as if everything they are can be summed up in one word, one category. At dinner parties, when people ask what I do for a living, I often tell them that I am a scientist or that I teach just to avoid the strange, wide-eyed looks and awkward pauses that follow when I tell people I am a psychologist. It seems that the category of “psychologist” carries with it a host of ideas and responses that, by its invocation, immediately turns every learning theorist, comparative psychologist, biopsychologist, developmentalist (-- and social psychologist) into a couch-toting, ego-peddling, Freudophile.

These cocktail-party experiences, coupled with a symphony of adolescent label-drama (I will spare you the details) and my familiarity with 1Henri Tajfel’s work on categorization and group behavior, have left me with both a healthy respect for and a general dislike of using category labels for people.

It was a surprise to me, then, at a checkout counter in a large membership warehouse store, that I was hoping, anticipating, and even wishing that someone would assign such a label to me.

It started as it usually does, with a quizzical look, a feeling of familiarity and anticipation that comes from an area of your being that is somehow secret and mysterious (I know this person from somewhere, but where?). As these feelings typically resolve themselves, I realized that I was standing face-to-face with a former student. I teach large sections of Social Psychology, so I have many occasions to come in contact with former students. During these times, I never know if they will be happy to see me (i.e., they did well in my class) or if they would rather avoid me (i.e., they did not do so well). The person at the checkout counter was smiling. This was a good sign.

We exchanged recognition statements – “I had you for my psychology class,” and “Yes, social psychology.” Now the real test begins. What will this student say about the class? What will the student say about me? Will I hear the words I so long to hear? Will I be categorized and labeled by this person?

Then, I heard the words, sweet and enchanting: “You’re a good teacher.” He must have noticed the change in my smile, from awkwardly apprehensive to graciously gleaming. He put me in the category of good teachers. All of the ISQ (course evaluation system) ratings and ratemyprofessor.com comments could not accomplish so much in such a short period of time as that one LABEL. Why did this arbitrary label (a label that I am sure the student did not give a second thought) mean so much to me?

Well, it may have something to do with how the brain works. Some models of the brain suggest that concepts operate as nodes (or connecting points) and that each concept is linked (through neural connections) with other concepts. One of the most important and frequently accessed concept in the human brain is “the self.” We know much about who we are because we spend a whole lot of time with ourselves. People learn about new concepts in the world often by figuring out how our “selves” relate to these concepts (see 2Kihlstrom, Beer,& Klein for a discussion of how this works). One thing that people know about who they are is that they are “good.” Humans place a high price on knowing that as individuals, we are connected to the concept of “good.” I guess that is why this student’s comment meant so much to me. I, and most other people, want to be categorized as “good.”

So, when you receive those not-so-positive ISQ (student rating) results, and you read those not-so-flattering ratemyprofessor.com comments, remember that the uneasy feeling you have is just your brain having trouble connecting your self-concept with those concepts. Too often, negative comments or evaluations can have such a negative impact on our emotions and motivation that we fail to take advantage of constructive criticism. If it helps to keep you motivated during ISQ season, just think back on those times when students made you feel that the world made sense by saying, “You’re a good teacher.”

References
1Tajfel, H., & Forgas, J. P. (2000). Social categorization: Cognitions, values and groups. New York: Psychology Press.

2Kihlstrom, J. F., Beer, J. S., & Klein, S. B. (2003). Self and identity as memory. New York: Guilford Press.

Greenwald, A. G., Banaji, M. R., Rudman, L. A., Farnham, S. D., Nosek, B. A., & Mellott, D. S. (2002). A unified theory of implicit attitudes, stereotypes, self-esteem, and self-concept. Psychological Review, 109, 3-25.

Journey of Thousands of Miles Is the First Step

Chiu Choi Electrical Engineering cchoi@unf.edu

There is a Chinese saying: “a journey of thousand miles begins with a single step.” I went to Taiyuan University of Science and Technology in Taiyuan, China for a short visit last month. I was accompanied by our Associate Dean Dr. Merckel. The purpose of the trip was to learn about their academic programs, infrastructure, resources, and to discuss with their leaders about exchange programs. The experience of this trip is unique. After this travel of thousands of miles, we have gotten the first step toward building a good relationship with the Chinese university.

After stepping off the plane, I noticed air pollution in Taiyuan. I was forewarned about it in prior web-browsing on the city of Taiyuan. The success of the local coal mining and other heavy industries comes with the price of polluted air. Air pollution is common in China as we all know. Even in non-industrial cities like Hong Kong and Macau, their air is also polluted. It is due to the movement of polluted air into those cities from the neighboring Pearl River delta areas, which are the heart of the “factories of the world.”

The hospitality provided by the university was superb. They treated us very nice and gave us much convenience in our few days of stay at Taiyuan. We had the opportunity to meet with their university president, vice presidents and college deans. We discussed with them potential collaboration and exchange programs. They showed us their resources and infrastructures. They have a good number of laboratories supporting a wide array of majors in engineering. Their flagship programs appear to be manufacturing of heavy machinery and material engineering. These majors are relevant to and very well supported by the local industries.

The university arranged for us a tour of a heavy machinery factory and a stainless steel plant. The heavy machinery factory produces construction and excavating equipment. To me it is sort of the John Deere of China. They also made the launch platforms for the rockets used in the Chinese space program.

The stainless steel plant was also very impressive. The heat was more than intense when the steel came out of the furnace. The literally red hot steel was rolled to thin sheets eventually. It was amazing to see how they got pressed and rolled over and over again and chopped into sizes suitable for shipping and handling. In the guided tour, I saw just a few workers in the production line. The manufacturing process was obviously automated. This plant was one of the largest in the world in terms of the amount of steel produced per year.

The administrators of Taiyuan University indicated that their graduating engineers became productive shortly after getting onboard these plants and others. It was because these graduates received education closely matching these manufacturing processes. Such approach reflects the old Russian style of engineering education according to the administrators. In the U.S. according to the national engineering accreditation criteria, we tend to focus on the fundamentals and give the students a more balanced education.

To appreciate the local culture and tradition, the university arranged a tour of several ancient sites for us to see. One of the historic sites was a walled city owned by a family for generations. This family compound was huge and looked extremely affluent at its time. They accumulated their wealth through tea trading with Europeans. They picked the tea leaves at one corner of China and shipped them across China to Eastern and Western Europe. The caravan navigated the first third of their journey along the Chinese rivers and continued the rest of the journey through the deserts and mountains by camels. A typical trip took three years to complete. The World War I and the extension of railroads into China from the West brought down this family business.
We have accomplished our goals of this trip. A cooperation agreement that promotes academic exchanges was jointly signed. Information about academic programs at both universities was shared. Most importantly friendship was built that will facilitate the success of our cooperation in the future.

The Meaning of a Bachelor’s Degree

Gordon Rakita Department of Sociology and Anthropology grakita@unf.edu

When I was a graduate student, I was assigned by my program as a teaching assistant to one of the archaeology faculty. I was thrilled because TAships were rare in my program and represented one of the few chances we graduate students had to develop valuable “teaching experience” for our résumés. I was somewhat less thrilled by the fact that I was assigned to a faculty member with a reputation. Professor X was quite a drinker, smoked constantly (even in the non-smoking building where his office was located), and was not above making the occasional inappropriate comment about female archaeologists. He was, to put it mildly, and unreconstructed, dinosaur-ish archaeologist of the old-school. I hesitate to point out that Professor X was very prolific, perennially published peer-reviewed articles (at least one per year), was a popular instructor with many undergraduates, and saw more of his graduate students successfully defend and acquire jobs than most other faculty.

TAing for Professor X was not an unpleasant experience, and I did learn quite a bit from him about managing classrooms of undergraduates, preparing lectures and exams, and negotiating the bureaucracy of a major university. One afternoon, as we walked to his Introduction to Archaeology course, Professor X made a statement that has stuck with me ever since. You see, the state government had recently instituted a lottery scholarship program (not unlike Florida’s Bright Future’s system) and our university (the flagship state institution) had seen a tremendous upsurge in undergraduate enrollments. Class enrollments were bulging, internet systems were taxed, and the student union was jammed with kids who six months earlier had been riding herd on their parents’ ranch. So it was in this context that during our stroll to class, Professor X turned to me and said, “You know Gordon, most of these students don’t belong here…and it’s our job to let them know that.”

I was fairly shocked by this statement. I had never contemplated the idea that anyone would not belong in college. You see, in my family, the unstated expectation of both my brother and me was that we would attend college and would (at a minimum) earn our Bachelor’s degree. From this perspective, I had viewed the state’s decision to develop a method to help fund everyone’s University education as a good plan. The idea that it might be misguided never crossed my mind. And further, I think this expectation that all young adults should be college bound is becoming much more common among states and households these days. The expectation is that most individuals will go to college.

Recently, two articles in education journals reminded me of this statement by Professor X and started me thinking about the meaning of a Bachelor’s degree. The first, was Michael Wesch’s “Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance” in Education Canada (http://www.cea-ace.ca/media/en/AntiTeaching_Spring08.pdf). Wesch is fairly famous in both anthropological and education circles as the producer, along with the students in one of his classes, of “A Vision of Students Today” which can be seen on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o). The second was Marty Nemko’s “America’s Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor’s Degree” in a recent issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i34/34b01701.htm).

Wesch makes the very interesting observation that if we replace the word “school” with the word “learning” in the phrase “..some students are just not cut out for school..” we end up with the rather provocative phrase “..some students are just not cut out for learning..” Ah ha! Here is the rejoinder to Professor X’s comment. By saying that some individuals don’t belong in college, Professor X was arguing that some students are undeserving of learning. Or was he?

I am sympathetic to Wesch’s point. I would never want to say that any student is not cut out for learning. He has a point; and his article is well worth reading. He makes a convincing argument for what is wrong with some of the teaching that goes on in higher education and advocates persuasively for teaching that facilitates learning. Indeed, reading his article has made me think anew about my upcoming Fall classes.

However, in another way, I think Wesch misses a point about a college education. Namely, he ignores the point that a Bachelor’s degree represents more than just learning about course materials, general education outcomes, or even specific skills imparted within the classroom. When I am introduced to someone with a Bachelor’s degree I have no idea if they can work a differential equation, dissect the rhetorical symbolism in Ulysses, or explain how collections of humans create a society by their individual actions. They may be able to do those things, they may not. What do I know about someone who has successfully completed an undergraduate degree? I can be fairly certain that this is someone who has set a 4+ year goal for themselves and has completed that goal. I know that this is someone who has learned to manage their time fairly well and has learned to prioritize various aspects of their life. I know that this is someone who has had to deal with peers and supervisors (some of whom they don’t like) and has successfully negotiated those relationships. I know this is a person who has managed bureaucracies, paperwork, course materials, and personal interactions that were potentially unpleasant and vexing and yet persevered. I know that a person with a Bachelor’s degree has invested time, energy, and money into their own development and has succeeded. In some regards, these sorts of experiences and knowledge (read as: learning) are much more important than differential equations, Ulysses, or the nature of society. I can teach them these latter things. I can not teach them the former; they must be experienced. A college degree is so much more than what’s taught in the classroom and we faculty are narcissistic if we think that student’s lives should revolve around us.

Lest you think that my observations are the subjective musings of a blogger, I direct you to Rebekah Nathan’s My Freshman Year (Cornell University Press, 2005). Nathan is the pseudonym of an academic Anthropologist who took a sabbatical and entered a university as a freshman. Her experiences formed the basis for her ethnography of undergraduate culture. Her research led her to several conclusions. For example (p. 140), “most professors and administrators overestimate the role that academics plays in student culture, and as a result they magnify the impact of teachers and classes on student life and decisions.” Indeed, after returning to her life as a professor, Nathan came to the noteworthy conclusion (p. 136) that “my course..is just one of the many balls being juggled in the time management challenge faced by each student.”

Finally, I’ll go one step further about Wesch’s argument. Perhaps one step more than I should go as this is the most cynical and pessimistic of ideas. I’ll even argue that Professor X was right in all senses of his comment that “most of these students don’t belong here.” Here I derive support from Nemko’s article. Nemko notes that “Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.” Nor do four years in college necessarily improve the situation. Nemko reports that “A 2006 study supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 50 percent of college seniors scored below "proficient" levels on a test that required them to do such basic tasks as understand the arguments of newspaper editorials or compare credit-card offers. Almost 20 percent of seniors had only basic quantitative skills. The students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the gas station.”

These statistics may seem outrageous to those of you who have never taught a freshman survey course with 200 students. Perhaps it’s a matter of sampling size…my classes are larger than many, so I see more of these under/un-prepared freshman…but they are there. Further, it’s not only that they are intellectually unequipped to deal with college; they are unequipped on emotional and maturity terms as well. Some students are simply not ready or willing to take on the responsibility of pursuing a Bachelor’s degree.

I will provide you with a bit of data and some anecdotal evidence. This Spring term I taught a section of our Anthropology 101 course (ANT2000 here at UNF). The course enrolled up to its cap with 200 students. Student grades were based on three measures; 4 surveys (12.5%), 6 classroom activities (12.5%) and three exams (25% each). The exams were the largest percentage of a student’s final grade. Each exam was given after approximately 5 weeks of lecture and I dedicated the class period after the exams were taken to return them to students and discuss the results. I also had those exams that were not picked up with me the second class after the exam was taken in case any students were absent the day I gave the exams back. Any student who missed their chance to retrieve their exam (and learn what grade they got on the exam) could pick up their exam during my office hours.

I was surprised to find at the end of the semester that 13 of the 186 students (7%) who completed the course did not pick up either of their first two exams. 9 of these 13 (69%) students who did not pick up their first two exams earned a D or F in the class. Put another way, of those who earned an F, 20% did not pick up their first two exams and 31% of the Ds did not pick up their first two exams. Why? Why didn’t these students pick up their exams? I can only assume that they were entirely uncurious about how they had performed on these exams. Moreover, they were not even interested in knowing if they were doing so poorly that their best interests would be served by dropping my class and trying another course. Note, I have not hidden their grades from them. I have encouraged at every turn that they consider their grades and their time management issues and make informed and rational judgments about their education. I provide them an Excel spreadsheet that calculates their expected final grade on the basis of their performance on course assessments. I am supportive of those students who contemplate dropping my course or who seek my advice about passing my (or any other) course. I often express my understanding that mine is not the only course they are taking and that they have many academic, professional, and personal responsibilities to balance. Despite this, I can only conclude that 7% of my ANT 2000 students don’t belong here.

I think we need to distinguish between schooling and learning as per Wesch’s article. I think both are important. But while I think he makes the point that we should not confuse the two, I do think he ultimately does conflate them in ways that gloss important issues. Or perhaps more precisely, he assumes that learning is the only thing that students should do in college. My students have a wonderful cognitive dissonance about college. 91% of the students in my last ANT 2000 course agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: “A college education should make students into well-informed, thoughtful, and engaged citizens, not simply prepare them for a particular career.” And yet, in the same survey, 63% agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: “The important thing about a college education is receiving a degree so that I can obtain a high paying job.”

I even had a student in one of my other classes, say “all I need out of UNF is a piece of paper” when I expressed to him that he wasn’t performing up to his potential. Mind you, this is an incredibly bright student. Yet his goal for his college education was that piece of paper. He wanted (to use Wesch’s terms) schooling, not learning. To my mind, this student doesn’t belong in college, and he doesn’t deserve a Bachelor’s degree, no matter how many courses he skates through. He may be ready to earn that degree sometime in the future. I sure hope so. Be he’s not ready now.

In this sense, Professor X was right. Some students don’t belong in college. And what’s worse, the idea that everyone belongs in college is a myth perpetrated on these individuals by our society. I personally think this myth is very problematic. Not because I don’t think that all individuals should have a chance or opportunity to go to college. But because I think it implies that if you don’t go to college and get your degree you are somehow not as good/smart/valuable to society as someone who did. It implies that if you don’t have your Bachelor’s degree you can’t be productive, happy, informed, creative, and bright; that you can’t make a valuable contribution to your family, community, and the nation. It suggests that those with jobs that do not require a college education are somehow less important than those who’s jobs do. I am no more important to the workings of this university than the person who tends the grounds, or keeps the air conditioner working, or delivers the mail. Indeed, we all depend upon these folks far more than we depend on the President or Provost or the Trustees.

Finally, a college education might not even improve a person’s lot in life. Nemko states that “Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than nongraduates, but that's terribly misleading. You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they'd still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound — they're brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.” College is a valuable experience. College should be a place of learning not just schooling. A Bachelor’s degree may say so many things about those who own the piece of paper. But I think I agree with Professor X.

Testing In Mind

Adam Carle Department of Psychology adam.carle@unf.edu

Why do we bother to give tests? Our students hate them. We often hate them. And, let’s be honest, both students and instructors sometimes come away feel a little angry at each other once the process ends. So, what point do tests serve? Before you read ahead, pause for a few moments. Reflect. Ask yourself, “Why do I give tests? What do I think they accomplish?”

Welcome back. I bet your answer included the notion that we give tests to measure memory. In other words, we give tests to examine what students learned. We write tests to see whether our students learned anything during our course. We implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) assume that testing doesn’t play an active role in learning. Tests don’t help students learn, do they? Class assists learning. Studying for tests helps students learn. But, does taking a test facilitate learning? Recent work by Karpicke and Roediger (2008) sheds some new and interesting light on the learning process and testing’s role in it. Believe it or not, taking tests adds to the learning process.

Karpicke and Roediger wanted to know several things. First, they wanted to know whether repeated studying following correct recall leads to improved long term retention. Once students learn information, does repeatedly studying it lead to long term retention? Second, they wanted to know whether testing plays a role in retention. Once students learn information, does requiring them to recall the information lead to increased retention? Lastly, they wondered whether they might find a joint effect; do repeated studying and testing uniquely lead to long term recall? Do they interact?

To examine this, they worked with students learning 40 Swahili/English word pairs and manipulated two things, one: whether word pairs remained in a study list following correct recall on a test, and, two: whether the test covered the entire set of words or only incorrectly recalled words. They randomly assigned students to participate in one of four conditions and tested them repeatedly. In the first condition, students studied the word pairs and then took a test to examine how many of the words they recalled. After the test, the students resumed studying the entire list, regardless of which pairs they’d remembered correctly. At the end of the new study period, they took a new test covering the entire set of 40 word pairs. They did this a total of four times. In the second condition, students also studied the list and then took a test. In this condition though, the students resumed studying after the test, but only studied words they’d missed. They no longer studied pairs they’d remembered correctly. At the end of the new study session, however, they took a test covering the entire set of 40 word pairs. They too did this four times. In the third condition, students received four study and testing sessions as well. These students studied the entire list in each study session, but each new test only examined words the students missed on an earlier test. In the last condition, students studied the pairs and took a test on them four times. In this condition, though, once they correctly identified a word pair, they stopped studying it and stopped getting tested on it. Essentially, as soon as students correctly recalled a word pair, they no longer studied it or received a subsequent test on it. At the end of the sessions, all students took a test covering entire list. Nearly all of the students could recall all of the pairs correctly. Thus, regardless of the type of learning, students had nearly perfect recall before leaving. Great. Wonderful. Right? Not exactly, I hope my students remember things later. I hope they show long term recall. I bet you do to. Not surprisingly, Karpicke and Roediger (2008) mostly wanted to examine how the different learning phases would affect long term recall. And, now, folks, it gets interesting.

One week after the learning phases, they tested the students again. Guess what they found. Seriously. Take a second and think about what you would expect. Think about the tests you give. Do you continue testing your students on the same material across the semester? Or, do you give a test once and move on to new material? You response gives your expectation. So, with your current practices in mind, who do you think showed the best long term recall? Let me tell you.

Students who received repeated testing on the entire list showed markedly better retention than students who did not receive repeated testing on the entire list. Students who repeatedly received testing on the entire set of items recalled about 80% of the words. Students who only got tested on words they’d missed barely recalled 30% of the words. Moreover, this did NOT depend on the type of studying students did during the learning phases. Regardless of whether students studied the entire list or whether they only studied words they’d missed, one week later students who’d received repeated testing on the entire set of items showed much better recall than students who only tested themselves on words they’d missed earlier. Repeated retrieval in the form of repeated testing increased retention, regardless of whether students repeatedly encoded (studied) words. Testing makes a difference. A big difference.

What does all this mean for us? Among other things, it suggests that we might want to reconsider how we construct our tests. We should probably put more thought into what we test. If we want students to remember important concepts, we should make and include mainly these concepts on the test. We should test our students on these concepts repeatedly. If we want students to retain more esoteric aspects of the course, we should make sure we cover that material on the test. And, again, we should require our students to retrieve those concepts from memory repeatedly. At the least, we should let ourselves feel less guilty for “forcing” our students to take tests. We can take comfort that a series of well-designed tests should help our students remember the material later, above and beyond “just” studying. As Karpicke and Roediger conclude, the “benefits [of studying]… clearly depend on the process learners engage in during repetition.” I don’t know about you, but I feel responsible for creating and maintaining this process. I know I’m going to spend some time between now and the start of the next semester thinking about my tests. You?

Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The Critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319, 966 - 968.

Edu-tainment

Gordon Rakita Department of Sociology and Anthropology grakita@unf.edu

I write this from Vancouver, Canada where for the past four days I have been attending the annual Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meetings. (And yes, the city is beautiful and it did snow while I was here!) As with other meetings of this genre, they consist of long uninterrupted blocks of presentations by scholars. The presentations are clustered into topical symposia and there are typically a dozen symposia running concurrently in both the morning and in the afternoon.

To give you a sample of a typical day, on Thursday I participated in a symposium in the morning that had approximately 10 papers (2.5 hours). There was an hour break for lunch, and then I attended a symposium in the afternoon, logging another 2.5 hours of sitting in a darkened room watching presentation after presentation. Presentations vary at the SAA meetings. Some are highly theoretical; others describe the results of recent excavations. Some present the results of sophisticated chemical analyses; others explain sampling strategies or statistical results. Some symposium are scheduled for large ballrooms as the organizers expect a large audience of interested members, others are placed in more modest sized rooms. 95% of presenters use PowerPoint these days.

These meetings can be very draining. By the end of the second day, most of us respond to inquiries about our wellbeing with phrases like “I don’t think I can sit through another paper today.” Bare in mind, this is not because the presentations are bad; indeed they are often quite good. It is simply that the amount of information we attempt to absorb during this four day bacchanalia of archaeology is overwhelming. Most of us are physically and mentally exhausted when we gratefully climb on the plane home.

But sitting in the back of one of those dark rooms one day I let my mind wander to a comparison of attending these sorts of meetings and attending classes at a university. The similarities are considerable and I think illuminating.

Let’s take for example the schedule of a hypothetical, full-time, freshman. She enrolls in five, 3-credit hour classes. This means that she will have 15 hours of class time to attend each week. Typically students will try to arrange their schedule to meet other commitments or interests, but let’s imagine that our student has spread her courses across the full working week. That’s three hours of class time each day.

Now what does our intrepid student’s class time consist of? Well, since she’s a freshman, most of her courses are going to be surveys or introductory courses. Some will be large lecture hall classes with 200 students; others will be smaller, say with 25 classmates. Many of these courses will be heavily lecture-based, with the professor presenting information using PowerPoint slides filled with text and images. Individual classes will range from 50 minutes to 1 hour and 15 minutes long.

So, our hypothetical student is essentially attending an SAA-style symposium each and every week day. If I asked my colleagues here at the meetings if they would like to do that, they’d look at me as if I had had too many over-priced ales at the hotel bar last night (as a matter of fact, I did). Simply put, they would react with horror at the idea. Why? Because, as I mentioned earlier, these meetings are draining. Well, why?

Here’s my point. Despite the fact that we are archaeologists attending symposia on topics of great interest to us, the presentations we attend are not that much different than any lecture. Presentations are filled with ideas and information that we are desperately trying to assimilate and retain at high speed. Most presentations are good, but some are not so good. The presenter rambles, goes over time, uses cruddy slides or tables of data. Some presenters do not articulate an overarching important question that frames their talk. Others talk in monotone. The darkened room is stifling with people and the blur of presentations makes your eyelids heavy.

The same things that make a presentation at a professional meeting a draining experience are the same things that make a lecture at a university draining. We faculty attend these sorts of events for a few days each year; students attend them five days a week for 16 weeks. On the other hand, the things that make for an interesting and engaging symposium apply to university lectures. Good presentations have a well crafted question or goal or theme. This question/goal/theme should be presented in such a way as to draw the listener and make him or her interested in the content of the presentation. Good presentations walk the audience through the material cleanly and clearly. And in the end, good presentations return to the question/goal/theme and tie up loose ends. But overall, a good presentation is engaging, compelling, and entertaining. Yes, I said entertaining.

My brother likes to refer to what I do as “edu-tainment.” I’m not sure I have a good rebuttal for that. On the one hand, I know that when students are engaged and attending to the activities in a class, then they learn better. So if a bit of entertainment does that, who am I to scoff at it. On the other hand, I do know that by brother’s term has a more pejorative connotation. That I’m actually a very low paid entertainer (do stand up comics make more that college professors?) and that perhaps the entertainment aspect of my classes might degrade the actual learning. I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that I appreciated those speakers this week who took the time to develop and engaging and entertaining presentation. Because if you asked me if I wanted to spend 2.5 hours each day attending presentations, I’d ask you if you had too many over-priced ales at the hotel bar last night.