Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 4)

(Here are Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 in case you missed them).

Well… I don’t think my students have this much conceptual difficulty, but I thought I’d start this post off with a bit of comedic relief.

Anyways, a week has passed since the last practical but I’m not behind in posting because this is the undergraduate reading week. My mind has been bubbling with ideas since then; most of which are the result of a TA brainstorming session we had on Friday. A group of enthusiastic learning assistants (lured partly by free pizza) gathered to share their ideas, concerns and advice with a representative from the undergraduate education department (or something of that sort). It looks like there are a lot of problems with this new physics curriculum (IE: the “practical sessions”). We conveyed a lot of worries and put forth a lot of suggestions which I will try to summarize here.

What I should first mention is that I am not alone in my difficulties. Almost all of the other learning assistants are, like me, having difficulties. Here are, in my opinion, the top three problems that we and the students are having with this course:

1. The TAs and the students have a severe lack of feedback from each other.
2. Students won’t ask questions about anything they’ve been having trouble understanding in class, on an assignment, or anything outside the lab activity.
3. The students have difficulty finishing the activities before the end of the practical. This leaves almost no time for theoretical (tutorial-like) questions.

So. Problem 1 (The biggest):

Students need feedback on their work so that they can narrow down what it is they don’t understand. I think one of the hardest things about learning (in a student’s reference frame) is figuring out what it is you don’t know. But students are not given any feedback on their lab book (aside from an initial trial grading of the first activity). The reason for this is that not all activities in their lab books will get graded, and the choice of which ones will be graded is kept secret until midterm. The problem is that the TAs haven’t been told either… so we can’t go through on a weekly basis and put comments in the lab books because we haven’t been assigned enough hours to do that much “correcting”. Hopefully this will be easily taken care of by simply telling the TAs to grade a subset of the week’s activities on a regular basis.

Students need meaningful feedback when feedback is given to them. It’s quite deceiving when a computer tells a student that they’ve gotten the question 100% right when the truth of the matter is there are many things they still don’t understand. But this is what is happening. Each week the students are expected to complete an online assignment hosted by the Mastering Physics website. The problem with these assignments, I think, is best conveyed using the analogy of — and I apologize to the students for this analogy — trying to teach a donkey the way into town by leading it with a carrot on a stick, then expecting it to be able to make the journey on its own. The questions on the Mastering Physics assignments are good questions BUT they are asked in such a way that holds the students hands and practically gives them the answers to each step. This severely reduces the effectiveness of the questions. When I asked one of the students if she had trouble with the Mastering Physics questions she replied, “Well, I got the question right … but I still don’t understand what I did“. Other TAs and even past students have told me similar stories about these assignments.

… but perhaps these assignments are intended to be more useful as feedback for the TAs, you say?

If this were the case, then at least their existence would have some merit. The fact that the vast majority of the students in my section get above 90% on every question should illustrate that this is not very helpful as feedback for us. Apparently this Mastering Physics site has been used for years, much before the recent curriculum change. I think it was part of an effort to recycle old bits of curriculum that is falling short.

It also looks like a good example of an over-reliance on technology to improve education. Computers don’t teach people; people teach people. Fancy gadgets, clickers and advanced quizzing systems are a great idea, but they themselves are not enough. They need to be used effectively. I think this curriculum is still in its early stages of metamorphosis and everyone is still trying to figure out more effective ways of using the new technology and new teaching methods.

Possible solution to all three problems:

One fantastic solution to this problem came together as a melange of a few suggestions in the TA brainstorming session. The organizers of this course got rid of the formal tutorial sessions because they deemed them ineffective and thought it would be more effective to work that kind of material into the practicals. The way we are currently doing this is not working. Instead, what would be more helpful is to have “theoretical” questions as part of the lab activities. There are several benefits to this if it is conducted well.

Firstly, it would encourage the students to work out questions as groups inside the practical sessions. They could get immediate feedback from the TA, and if they worked out the question on their fancy new whiteboards (which I found to be an effective method when I tried it last week) the TA could immediately gather feedback from them in terms of conceptual difficulties and so forth. The questions could be made more difficult without the “hand holding” formulation because if they truly got stuck, they could ask the TA who would be able to gauge what hints were just enough to get the group back on track.

Secondly, the questions could be directly related to the lab activities they would do immediately after. This could solidify their understanding and also make it more interesting. They would be able to see the physics happen on paper, and then in real life. From a purely personal perspective, I frequently found the classroom material to be detached from “real life” physics when I was an undergraduate. It would be nice for the students to see a strong connection between the two through the curriculum.

Thirdly, and most importantly, it would give the students a taste of real science. IE: using a model to derive a prediction (hypothesis) and test it out in the lab. This would also mean that students could be expected to come up with their own experiment (perhaps with the TA’s help) in order to test their prediction. This would eliminate the mundanity of following lab activity instructions step-by-step with no real thought behind it (as was very common for me in my undergraduate days).

In all, I think it’s been a productive week for me as a learning assistant. I’ve pretty much given up on addressing them as a class in an attempt to gather conceptual difficulties. Instead what I found more useful was to visit each workstation  individually. They are much less shy when I do that. That, in conjunction with having them work out a tricky problem on their whiteboards, will hopefully generate a better feedback loop between us.

I’d love to see more of these TA brainstorming sessions for other courses. I think much can be gained from a diverse group of minds and some free pizza.

Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 3)

(Here is Part 1 and Part 2, in case you missed them).

Sorry for the silence this week… you know how it is.

Before I begin, looks like the MIT physics department is having a few troubles of its own with the new physics curriculum. And, don’t forget to check out the First Excited State for Week 2 of the teaching journal.

I need your help. The practicals are becoming slightly tricky in terms of grabbing students’ attention for tutorial-like situation. As I mentioned last week, the students are vastly more motivated to do the activities than ask tutorial questions because they will be getting graded on the activities. We have the ability to create quiz questions on their workstation computers and we’ve tried creating a quiz question to try to draw out questions from the students. What actually happened was they spent a little while on the question, guessed if necessary (since it wasn’t worth any grades) and then didn’t ask any questions (probably for fear of not having enough time to do the lab activity).

I’ve been toying with a few ideas to try to get their participation in asking questions. The first is instead of asking the whole class a question and going over the solution, to instead go around and ask each workstation one at a time. It would take up the same amount of time for the students. The upside is that they will be much less shy and almost certainly reveal any gaps they have in their understanding. The downside is that any enlightening bit of information will be confined to that table.

In order for the whole class to benefit, I’d have to somehow engage the whole class in problem solving. One general idea I’ve had in that respect is to do away with a multiple choice quiz type question (and eliminate half hazard guesses) and instead ask an involved/conceptual problem. They could then write their answers/ideas on their whiteboards and share their ideas with the rest of the class. Alternately, if they are too shy to speak up, I could go around the class while they are working on the activities and look at the ideas on their whiteboards and discuss with them.

I think the problem here is shyness and time constraints. I’m wondering if any of you have ideas to get students to participate in sharing their conceptual difficulties with the class. Also, I’m wondering if any of you have any ideas for relatively short, interesting questions on the subject of static electricity.

Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 2)

(Here is Part 1, in case you missed it).

Looks like there’s also a duality in the blogosphere. Over at The First Excited State, our favorite semi-anonymous author is joining me in this teaching assistant blogothon with his weekly Teaching Journal.

Anyways, another week, another practical session. As I mentioned in Part 1, this week the students measured the speed of sound. So far, the activities seem to be on the right track. They encourage a bit of playfulness and try to help students get some physical intuition about the concepts they learn in class. This week, for example, on of the questions asked the students to play around with the microphone; whistle into it, speak into it, etc, and look at the resulting waveform on the computer screen. It’s interesting to see how the students react to this type of question. One of the students apparently sang into the microphone in an enthusiastic operatic manner and when he noticed that he was being watched by a TA, he expressed very apologetic sentiments. I think it was a small illustration of a student conditioned to believe in the myth that you can’t be learning if you’re having fun. I try to encourage such playfulness. I went around the room telling students to try getting two people to whistle into the microphone at slightly different pitches. I demonstrated this to one of the workspace groups and they were impressed that they could actually see the beats show up on the computer screen.

That being said, there are some problems creeping up. The most prevalent is time constraint. These practicals are supposed to replace the labs AND the tutorials. Each week we have two hours to try to fit in these activities and a little problem session. So far, the activities have taken the students the full two hours. Since students are being graded on the activities and students tend to take a very grade-oriented view of education, the TAs and the students both feel pressured to just ignore the problem sessions and do the activities.

Fortunately, we’ve been given the freedom to grade the students’ workbooks as we see fit. If the majority of students don’t have time to finish all of the “required” activities, then we have the authority to issue grades which compensate for this. The wonderful fact about the grading scheme is that it is on a scale of: 0-4. This means that the majority of the time, the majority of the groups will get a 3. This not only takes pressure off of the TAs that grade them but also it removes much of the competitive pressure on the students. We’re, after all, trying to remove the grade-hungry attitude some of these students have to education. I am going one step further and not showing the students their grade unless they explicitly ask me for it. I’m hoping this will force them to pay attention to the detailed feedback I give them in their workbooks, which, unlike an obscure number, is what will really help them know how they’re doing in the course.

Finally, I’d like to point you to a post on the School of Everything blog to do with something I’ve been thinking about for a little while: adapting teaching methods to reflect the diversity in ways people learn. It goes over the great uncertainty in classification of learning styles and the difficulty this causes in trying to generate a teaching style that accounts for the diversity of people’s minds. I found it very interesting, and thought you might too.

Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 1)

Well, the first of my first “physics practicals” were this week. By this I’m referring to the TA job I’ve been raving about. I promised pictures of the shiny new rooms we get to use, so without further ado:

Behold!

So hopefully these pictures will help you understand why I say the new rooms feel like a sportscar.

… okay, so if they feel like a sportscar, how’s the mileage, you ask?

A fair question. The way these rooms are constructed make them ideal for group interaction. They take focus off of the LA, which is as it should be. The LA is not a lecturer. But for that same reason it is very difficult for the LA to hold students’ attentions if they are telling them something important. To compensate for this they have a wireless microphone and speakers installed to give LAs voices a sort of omnipresence in the room. In addition to that the LAs have the ability to control the students’ computers (individually or in bulk) from the main computer at the front of the room; projecting information onto them, creating mini quizzes, taking full control, writing on them, etc. Overuse of these tools could result in the students going through a whole practical without interacting directly with the LA. I see this as a potentially bad thing. So what I’ve tried to do is avoid using the microphone altogether. Nothing says I need to address the class from the front of the room. I just walk to the middle where everyone can hear me better.

This is what I did the first day, and before I opened my mouth I suddenly felt that sensation I had been warned about by my TA friends: the moment of dread. All of those eyes of students in a required course, some of whom hate physics and don’t want to be there, staring at me, expecting me to do something… after about five seconds it passed and I broke the silence with an overly enthusiastic “HI!”. (I might have scared a few). After that I radiated as much enthusiasm and personality as I could muster. One of the first questions I asked them was: “who here absolutely hates physics?”. Out of a class of about thirty students, seven hands shot up. I’m focusing on those seven. If I can make them curious about physics, the rest will be a piece of cake.

The first practical’s activities were a bit of a drag. They mainly involved analyzing flash simulations of waves. Next practical, however, will be fun. I’ve got it all planned out. The scheduled activity for that practical will be measuring the speed of sound using a standing sound wave in a closed tube. The physics and process behind that experiment is completely analogous to my post about measuring the speed of light with chocolate and a microwave. They will use a microphone to find the pressure nodes (quiet bits: reverse analog of the soft bits of the chocolate), and use this to measure the wavelength for a given frequency (pitch).

My plan is to begin the practical by showing this youtube video. It’s a video of a Ruben’s Tube (if you haven’t seen a Ruben’s Tube you must watch that video). The physics behind the shape of the flame in a Ruben’s Tube is the same physics they will be using in their activity. With a Ruben’s Tube you could just take a ruler and measure the wavelength directly since you can see the shape of the wave in the fire. Unfortunately for the students, they won’t have that spectacular representation of the wave and will have to resort to using a microphone to find the quiet bits.

I’ve been keeping notes of ideas I have to make the practicals better. My plan is to get as much feedback from the students as possible. Hopefully some fine tuning will get everyone’s enthusiasm resonating throughout the practicals.

A spring TA offer that adds a spring to my step

Hopefully the regular readers of this blog have deduced that I am driven to invoke enthusiasm about physics (and science in general) in anyone I come into contact with. One factor motivating me is the fact that people generally have misconceptions about science and scientists that push them away from learning wonderful things about the world. Recently, I found a link to a subsite of SEED magazine that overviews the current state of science. The site, among many other things, highlights this public perception of science.

I also happily discovered that one of my fleeting ideas involving mixing coffee and science has actually been well established for a while! Maybe you’re like me and you like the idea of discussing interesting aspects of science in a coffee shop setting. If you are, and you haven’t heard of science cafés, behold!

Science cafés are live events that involve a face-to-face conversation with a scientist about current science topics. They are open to everyone, and take place in casual settings like pubs and coffeehouses.

At a café you can… learn about the latest issues in science, chat with a scientist in plain language, meet new friends, speak your mind and, talk with your mouth full.

And to make things even better, there are even a few in Canada. One of which, based in Toronto, I hope to check out sometime in the near future. When I do, you’ll hear about it.

Let me also remind you of my dissatisfaction with conventional teaching methods (in physics), which I think can potentially do more harm than good at the introductory level. After all this buildup I can now tell you what the title of this post has been alluding to and hopefully you will understand my excitement. I just attended the first TA meeting to prepare me for the new pilot physics lab course at the University of Toronto. The physics department has caught on to what physics education researchers have been saying for a while: conventional lectures add little or nothing to a student’s conceptual understanding about basic physics concepts. One tested improvement on physics education is called Peer Instruction which takes advantage of the fact that students predominantly learn best by interacting with each other. The U of T physics department is applying this method to one of the introductory physics courses. The curriculum emphasizes a hands-on approach to learning. Students work in small groups on conceptual problems which force them to discover things for themselves. The TAs act as guides who pose leading questions rather than giving solutions away (which sounds right up my alley!).

Even the architecture of the rooms has been completely rethought (I’ll post pictures when I have a chance). They are shiny new rooms with hexagonal workstations able to seat a group of students. The workstations are each equipped with desktop computers and conveniently placed electrical sockets (for laptops, lab apparatus, etc…). The walls adjacent to the workstations are covered with panes of translucent glass which, other than looking stylish, act as “whiteboards” on which to work. One of the professors described the motivation behind the architecture as follows:

If you walk into a fast-food joint, there is an obviously placed counter underneath billboards that show the menu items and combos. There is a cash register at one end and meal trays on the other. Upon seeing this configuration, it is obvious that a customer should walk up to the counter, place their order, pay, and then sit down and eat. By contrast, a fancy restaurant contains groups of tables and a cash register near the door. Again, the architecture communicates that in order to get food, one should sit down, wait for someone to take your order, then pay when you are ready to leave.

In the same way, a lecture hall gives the following message to a student: sit down, the teacher will be the center of your attention, and don’t talk to each other. These new rooms fight that message by encouraging the opposite: group work and peer instruction.

Apparently they’ve conducted a pilot program for this course. I asked about the effect it has had on the students’ learning and overall impression of physics. The professor commented that the grades on the midterm have greatly improved from previous years. But what I find more exciting is his comment that he now sees students who, after being forced to leave the classroom, seek out unlocked classrooms to further discuss with each other what they’ve just learned! And these aren’t physics majors. These are students from varied programs of study!

… and I get to be a Teaching Assistant…
or should that be Learning Assistant now…

My Issues With Physics Education

A few days ago I was chugging through the huge list of subscriptions I have on google reader, and I came across this post at ZapperZ’s Physics and Physicists: “What Is Worse Than A “Lost Soul”? An Ignorant Lost Soul!”. I enjoy reading his opinion posts and generally agree with most of what he writes (and this post is not an exception to that trend). ZapperZ writes a rebuttal to an opinion column in an independent university online newspaper. The author of this column argues that the Humanities need more attention as an academic subject, however, the point is argued in a way that attempts to diminish the importance of Science education in a generally spiteful manner.

Today it seems like the emphasis put on math and science in our country has made students satisfied with learning by sitting in lecture and simply regurgitating facts on multiple-choice Scantrons in a mindless Dark Age of their own.
[...]
Sure, they can dazzle with Darwin’s theory and calculate quantum physics, but in the area of critical thinking, they seem to be lacking.
[...]
all we can really do as [humanities] students is hope for something better for ourselves as critical thinkers. We need to defend our education as worthwhile and pursue the humanities because we like to do what we like and leave the rest to do the math. In the end, the humanities capture what the rest cannot, and that is, what it means to be human in this chaotic world.

This encompasses two sentiments that I’ve already blogged about in “Creativity in Physics”, and “It’s not just about access, it’s about accessibility”; overlooking the creative aspects of science, and failing to realize that the scientific curiosity which inspires us to study this “chaotic world” has as much to do with “being human” as the curiosity that inspires one to pursue any other discipline. I’m not going to try to tell you why this author’s opinions are poorly motivated, ZapperZ does that well enough. I would, instead, like to ask you to look beyond the surface matter of these opinions and think about what is motivating this author’s spite and distaste for science. Presumably the only prominent experience he has had with science is through the education system. Presumably these opinions are formulated from his experiences of the science classes he has attended in high-school. I can’t help but feel that his article illustrates more than just spite for science; it illustrates a failure of the scientific education system.

Over at Backreaction, Bee has frequenly expressed the need for a scientific revolution in many aspects of society, and I would like to add to that by saying that one of the most important revolutions that has yet to take place is in education. (Physics education is what I know best, so that’s what I’ll talk about, however, it’s entirely likely that one can draw many parallels to other fields of education.) For a while now, as a student, I’ve been developing a growing suspicion that we suck at the basics. The more of my peers I talk to, the more I get the feeling that institutions just simply have no idea how to properly teach physics. I think this is largely due to lack of proper scientific research in education. Ironically, the very thing we are attempting to teach subsequent generations — namely proper application of the scientific method — is the very thing we are not applying to try to understand how best to carry that out!

When I think back to high-school, I remember the vast majority of my friends developed a loathing for physics class, and hence, physics itself. Why? Well, I think it really all comes down to lack of context. Learning is an active process; no teacher can force large amounts of information into a student’s mind. It is the student who ultimately decides what information is going to stick. Without motivating the student, without provoking thought and curiosity to learn the topic, little will actually be learned. From what I gather, the physics curriculum in high-schools seems to exhibit a very industrial approach to learning. It’s as if we are trying to program students minds like a computer. Surely you know as well as I know that students’ minds are not computers, but the curriculum doesn’t seem to reflect this truth. The students are first taught the mathematical background needed to understand physics, then they are presented with physical laws, usually in the form of easily memorizable equations, then they do some example questions which tend to be extraordinarily detached from “real life”. By this time, most students become frustrated and/or apathetic and wonder: “why the hell am I learning this?”. If the students are lucky (like I was) they will have a physics teacher who provides “interesting problems” perhaps relating to “real life” situations that provoke curiosity and creativity.

… if your teacher was so good, why did your friends get so frustrated with physics, you ask?

A valid question. Fortunately (or unfortunately) for me, I was not an “A” student. I had average grades good enough to get by, so I felt safe enough to be able to skip some of the regular homework problems in favor of the more “interesting”, ungraded problems that fell outside the regular curriculum¹. I also, luckily enough, happened to pick up a popular physics book which gave me added context and made me curious about things like relativity, curving spacetime and black holes. I reassured myself that all of these things I was learning like “vectors”, “forces” and “energy” would get me closer to understanding black holes. But as for the other students, who had no intention of becoming physicists², they were given no motivation (even from a curiosity perspective) for learning these concepts. To minimize the pain of enduring this kind of systematic force-feeding of knowledge, students begin to make their own associations; they associate specific problems with specific equations and mindlessly chug through to get a number at the end (hopefully not forgetting the units in the process).

This kind of curriculum does not facilitate the learning of creative and critical thinking that are characteristic of “real life” science³. It is, therefore, no surprise to me that many people do not associate these things with science. People, of no fault of their own, fail to realize that science is not a collection of facts, science does study the new and unexplained, and science is not a belief system; it is more like a “doubt system”.

Fortunately, people are starting to realize that the education system is not all it’s cracked up to be. I saw the first glimmer of hope (and got the courage to develop the opinions I’m presenting) after attending a lecture given at McGill by Eric Mazur of Harvard University, who is probably best known for his research in education. His findings are probably best summed up in this New York Times article. Here’s an excerpt:

From what I’ve seen, students in science classrooms throughout the country depend on the rote memorization of facts. I want to change this. The students who score high do so because they’ve learned how to regurgitate information on tests. On the whole, they haven’t understood the basic concepts behind the facts, which means they can’t apply them in the laboratory. Or in life.

Just today I read a post on sciencegeekgirl (a recent blog find for me… I’m enjoying the read) describing a lecture given by a fellow named Dan Schwartz (she has another post about his work here). Apparently he is also an education researcher and his findings point in favor of allowing students to play around with ideas and problems first, and then teaching them the material required to better understand the solutions.

[...] We train people to become expert at routine tasks, but what we need to emphasize instead is innovative experiences. Let go of what you’re told, and try something new. For one, when students innovate a solution first, then they have a context for what they’re learning. When given the solution first, they don’t have a context for it. [...]

A sense of play seems to have a strong link to creativity and learning. Running with that theme is ZapperZ who has been writing wonderful posts about how to revamp introductory physics laboratory courses (Here’s his most recent installment). He explains why intro physics labs are important for developing conceptual skills (like critical thinking) that can be carried well beyond a physics setting, why he thinks the current lab experiments are inadequate, and he also comes up with interesting ideas for experiments that engage student curiosity and creativity, like this one from his third installment:

Construct a pendulum clock. To make this clock useful, it would be helpful if the pendulum can swing back and forth once as close to 1 second as possible. Then each complete oscillation will take just one second. That way, this clock [can] measure time in increments of one second. You may use a stop watch to calibrate your pendulum to verify that it makes a one-second swing. Try to build this as accurately as possible. You must describe in detail in your lab report how you accomplish this task and why you chose to do it this way.

In addition to all of these points I’d like to mention that despite the fact that current physics curricula seem to be set up to mostly benefit future physicists and engineers⁴, most students forced to take high-school physics won’t even go on to pursue careers in science and technology. Most will, however, go on to become active citizens in a democratic society. With problems like global warming growing in urgency, and as technology becomes more and more integrated into society, widespread scientific literacy will (and has already) become overwhelmingly important for well informed political and social decisions! (And yet, studies in the U.S. show that only 55% of people tested know that the Earth requires one year to complete an orbit around the Sun. Good grief!)

…but that’s just the way I see it. What do you think? I’d love to hear your experiences with the education system regardless of your specialization (or the age of this post)!

____

1. Unfortunately, as I discovered after graduating from high-school, and after the high-school obtained a new principal, my teacher had been restricted to teaching math on the grounds that he wasn’t sticking to the approved physics curriculum!
2. Actually I had no idea what “physicists” did and why they were different from engineers until the first year of my B.Sc. began. I just knew I wanted to understand the strange things about the world I heard about in books…
3. I actually wasn’t formally introduced to the scientific method until I happened to take a complementary course in psychology… and that’s where I learned it!
4. I actually don’t think the current education system, even above high-school level actually benefits future scientists and engineers much. I think creative, knowledgeable and competent researchers are produced at most educational institutions in spite of, rather than because of the education system.