Category Archives: Education

Looking at Teaching as a Mature Industry

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Why Does College Cost So Much?

They’re promoting an upcoming book, so the article is merely a summary, but from it arises an interesting premise: education is not an industry that benefits greatly, efficiency-wise, from technology. And that’s an interesting point. If there is a limit to how quickly a student can absorb knowledge, and I think there probably is, then any teaching efficiencies you might gain by adding technology are limited, and certainly won’t scale the way it does in other industries, where you might be able to automate processes and eliminate positions and have the potential to reduce costs.

Technology certainly helps the student; I shudder to think of what writing a thesis would have been like without a word processor program, having had the undergraduate experience of writing papers on an electric typewriter and concocting exams in the navy back when they were much more computer-phobic (cut-and-paste was a literal action, not a mouse-click). But that’s not going to get more information into their collective heads in a fifty-minute lecture, or make them read a book faster. It certainly doesn’t scale according to Moore’s Law.

Computers and peripherals (e.g. processing power, storage, networking) are deflationary. The price of all of the related hardware has been roughly constant over the years — and that doesn’t even reflect inflation: it still costs about a thousand dollars of today’s money to buy a middle-of-the-road computer, a few hundred bucks for a monitor, and another hundred for an external hard drive. But the increase in computing power, sizes of monitor screens and capacity of hard drives has been huge. That helps hold down costs in a lot of places, but if it can’t help the professor teach a class, it’s not going to hold the cost of instruction to the level of inflation. Not until you have robotic teachers, at least.

Death to Headline Editors

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I’ve seen this link with this headline a number of places recently, and I find it bothersome. Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech

The problem is that the speaker isn’t speaking out against schooling. The objection is that other things have replaced schooling in schools: the emphasis is on doing well on the test, at the expense of learning. There is no call to end education, the demand is to fix a flawed system.

Some of you may be thinking, “Well, if you pass a test, or become valedictorian, didn’t you learn something? Well, yes, you learned something, but not all that you could have. Perhaps, you only learned how to memorize names, places, and dates to later on forget in order to clear your mind for the next test. School is not all that it can be. Right now, it is a place for most people to determine that their goal is to get out as soon as possible.

I am now accomplishing that goal. I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination.

Get Your, er, Buns to Mars

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Seventh Graders Find a Cave on Mars

On their two targeted images the students found lava tubes, as they had hoped. And on the backup image, they also found a small, round black spot. Many Martian lava tubes are marked by aligned chains of collapse pits, which typically have flat floors and sloping sides. The spot they [sic] students found, however, appears to have vertical sides.
…
The students have submitted their site as a candidate for imaging by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. HiRISE can image the surface at about 30 centimeters (12 inches) per pixel, which may allow a look inside the hole in the ground.

We Must Not Have a Mind-Shaft Gap!

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The Real Science Gap

Sorta-long article which argues that the current research framework in the US is untenable. It suffers from the misconception that the only career path of a scientist is to become a university professor, and only occasionally acknowledges this isn’t the case. What it does point out, though, is that we have a glut of post-docs, about half of whom are foreign students here on H-1B visas, and (paradoxically?) argues that we have plenty of home-grown scientists. The result of this is that there is no financial incentive to enter the field, which is why domestic students are shunning science. Color me skeptical. This completely ignores the effect of simply loving science, and going on to get a degree might have something to with liking your work, rather than the cold pursuit of money.

By focusing on the labor aspect it also completely misses one of the supporting arguments for improving science education. Not all people studying science need to become scientists, and it is not a tragedy if you take science classes, or major in a science field, and don’t become a scientist. There is value in being scientifically literate, and it’s painfully clear that we have a large chunk of scientifically illiterate people in the US. I think we’re better off having a population that can call bullshit on some of the howlers our politicians try to pass off as the truth; I’d like to set the bar a little higher than recognizing Reagan’s trees cause more pollution than automobiles do as baloney. If you aren’t savvy enough to know that antibiotics don’t affect viruses, or reject evolution in favor of creation, can you make effective decisions about biological research like stem cells? Can you be informed enough not to cower in fear when the subject of radiation or nanotechnology comes up?

Lather and Rinse

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Tell and Repeat courses

Aka student regurgitation. To avoid this, one must come up with questions which test for understanding, rather than information chucking in the vertical direction.

Anyway, Rhett mentions a wonderful conceptual question, and one I had not run across before, as an example.

The only bad thing about this question is that they aren’t trivial to create. Oh snap – well, I just gave away an awesome question. Truthfully, this question has been “out in the wild” for a long time. It is still a great question and you could probably use it on a test. The problem with a question being in the wild is that students can just memorize the solution – this means that question no longer tests for understanding.

One solution is to have a large number of questions, so that simple memorization is difficult, but these questions are hard to come by. Another is to have modular questions, so that you could ask about the same concept in different ways, but that’s far easier with algebraic results, where you change what information is given and which variable you want the students to solve for. I’m not sure to what extent it’s possible with a discussion question. Rhett’s example changes a variable, certainly, but not in the same way as an algebraic problem.

Another, I think, is to phrase a situation with a contradiction and have the students find out what the problem is with the phrasing of the question — a “why isn’t this possible?” kind of problem, or “find the fish flaw.” I see this all the time in crackpot discussions; once you remove the rigor of math, it’s easy to state a model which has some unphysical aspect and contradicts itself, which is why thought experiments alone can never disprove some phenomenon, and why perpetual motion machines are easy to describe but never work.

Here’s a classical physics example: you swing a bucket in a big circle which passes over your head. You adjust the speed so that the bucket comes to stop, with the string taut, directly overhead, at which point the bucket and water fall on your head. Is that possible?

A student may think so, because from a conservation of energy standpoint all you need is to have the kinetic energy at the bottom be equal to the potential energy at the top, so that the kinetic energy vanishes, and presto! You’re wet. But this ignores the requirement of the taut string: in order for that to be true, there must circular motion (not uniform, because v will be changing, but still circular) and this requires that there be tangential movement. Even as the tension tends toward zero, there is still gravity, so at the apex you would still have a centripetal acceleration, and thus v cannot go to zero. The bucket cannot come to a stop directly overhead with a taut string. (and yet it was so easy to state that it would happen …)

Street Corner Science

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Normally, learning your physics on the streetcorner is a dicey thing. But not in Chicago on June 6

Street Corner Science:
Ask a Nobel Laureate

Find us in front of the Chicago Wrigley Building on the afternoon of Sunday, June 6 and ask the Nobel Prize winning Physicist, Dr. Leon Lederman, anything you want about science, technology, and the physical world!

via

Superluminal Man Meets The Microquark Kid

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Faster than light, smaller than an atom

What do you do when you get an unphysical answer on an exam, and is there any way to mitigate this?

Some combination of carrot and stick is the usual way; of course; when I had control over grading policy it was in the navy and we mainly used the big stick: grossly unphysical answers were conceptual errors and it meant a big loss of points on the question — there was no amount of correct information that would let you have a passing score on that particular problem. To drive this home, it was reinforced with feedback from homework and quiz results — I tried to not let an opportunity pass where I could point out how wrong such an answer was and how much it would cost come test-time. But it was also buttressed by having other divisions using similar grading policy, which is a knob not really available (or at least less accessible) in an academic setting.

Who was Charles Lindberg?

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Who Is College Material?

In all likelihood, therefore, the developmental students had heard the name Charles Lindbergh. It’s just that 90% never cared enough to follow through. They never looked him up in a reference book or on the web. They never asked their parents or teachers. They just shrugged and went on with their lives.

After more than 25 years teaching at the City University and State University of New York, I’ve come to the counterintuitive conclusion that the single greatest predictor of whether a student will succeed or fail in college is not what he knows when he graduates from high school but what he wants to know when he graduates from high school. Intellectual curiosity is more determinative than high test scores or good work habits because it precedes them — indeed, it causes them. The desire to know just for the sake of knowing, to pick up random facts and start drawing connections in your mind, is the hallmark of the lifetime learner.

I don’t think it’s counterintuitive at all. It’s a matter of being able to devise a way to measure it. However, having gotten the WTF? facial expression from many people when a subject like this is broached, I get the impression that the intellectual curiosity trait is not particularly widespread. There are scads of people who treat learning as a burden.