Re: student assessment/content knowledge - FORWARD from John Belcher

[Richard Hake <rrhake@EARTHLINK.NET>]

John Belcher requested that I FORWARD (see below) some local MIT
information relevant to a question raised by Dennis Roberts concening
the MIT studio course.

Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
24245 Hatteras Street, Woodland Hills, CA 91367
<rrhake@earthlink.net>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~hake>
<http://www.physics.indiana.edu/~sdi>


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FORWARD from John Belcher

In Richard Hake's recent post . . .[of 19 Mar 2004 12:39:55-0800
<http://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0403&L=aera-d&T=0&O=D&P=7031>].
. . , he quoted Dennis Roberts to the effect that:

> "This . . . [Belcher's (2003) MIT studio course] . . . . is
> interesting ... WHERE do they get the space to do this? ...snip...
> I don't see ANYway that a course
> professor or Department could unilaterally decide to break a class
> like this up into 100 small groups of 5 each sitting around tables
> ... with or w/o a laptop. ... I would be interested in how the
> logistics of this have been worked out."

To add some local MIT information on this,
the decision to build studio classroom space at MIT (see
<http://web.mit.edu/giving/spectrum/winter04/teal-teaching.html> was
taken at an institute level, not a deparmental level, in the service
of broad educational experiments sponsored by the MIT Committee on
Educational Technology (<http://web.mit.edu/cet/>) co-chaired by the
MIT Provost and the Dean for Undergraduate Education. A deparment
would have had very little chance of pulling this off.  It really had
to come from the top.  And even then it was hard.

Second, the money for rennovation is not coming out of departmental
funds, it is coming out of general Institute funds, and out of
educational funds donated to the institute by Alex d'Arbeloff, former
Chair of the Corporation and CEO of Terradyne, and the MIT/Microsoft
iCampus Alliance, and NSF (a comparatively small amount, but great
for leveraging), see the funding links at
<http://web.mit.edu/cet/>.  Again, it has to come from the top.

Third, we also have large lecture halls at MIT with 400 seats, and I
have taught in those (see student comment on my lectures in spring
1994
at <http://web.mit.edu/jbelcher/www/8.02.html>).  These quotes sound
great until you note that this is based on 175 responses at the end
of the term and there were 700 students in the course. I also failed
12% of that class.  My "large lecture hall" was filled with very few
students.  That may be a phenomena that is limited to MIT, but it is
a very real one here.

Finally, if you have read the MIT faculty news letter I wrote (see
reference below with online link) you know that the first time out in
studio with 500 students last spring 2003 was not well-received by
the students, even though the learning gains were way up and the
failure rate was way down.  After many changes to some valid
criticisms we are doing it again this term, and it is being well
received.

Incidentally, all of the visualization software we have developed is
freely available.  Some of this is quite beautiful, see wired.com if
you don't believe me, at
<http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,62681,00.html>. They are
linked into mit's open course ware site, (http://ocw.mit.edu) or you
can go directly to a tour at
<http://evangelion.mit.edu/802TEAL3D/teal_tour.htm>.

cheers

John W. Belcher
Professor of Physics
37-695 MIT 77 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge MA  02139
email:  jwb@space.mit.edu
phone:  617-253-4285 or 617-253-5964
CECI office:  9-355b
url:  http://web.mit.edu/jbelcher/www


REFERENCES
Belcher, J.W. 2003. "Improving Student Understanding with TEAL" [TEAL
= Technology Enhanced Active Learning], MIT Faculty Newsletter Vol.
XVI No. 2 October/November; online at
<http://web.mit.edu/jbelcher/www/fnlEditedLinks.pdf> (176 kB).