Re: [Phys-l] Cramster et al.

[David Craig <craigda@lemoyne.edu>]

> .. so let's not shirk our duties on assignments and grades and give them more ammunition for criticizing our profession.   If you want the students to do the work you must do your work as well.  

While I appreciate the thoughts folks are contributing, I can do without the cheap shots.   With all due respect, you have no idea how hard I work at what I do.   Let's focus on the ideas, strategies and tactics without assuming I am lazy or incompetent.  The intent of my question was to learn about approaches others take.

I constantly work at improving how I teach, doing my level best to be as effective as I can be.   Learning physics in upper level occurs through working problems.   Whatever incentive structure one designs, that aspect won't change.    While I have historically been a fan of rewarding the hard work the best students put in to problem sets, that's becoming more complicated.

(As far as looking examples up in books, while true -- I remember this as a student as well -- this generation of student barely knows what a book, let alone a library, is.    Or rather, they know what they are, but they seem totally unwilling to actually use them.   Cramster has brought the problem to a whole new level -- giving complete solutions book by book, problem by problem.  They don't have to spend hours poring through books -- a process that might actually teach them something, I might add -- everything is just a couple of clicks away.)   

One reasonably effective approach is a kind of seminar-style problem workshop where students are responsible for preparing solutions to problems and then presenting them to the rest of the class, thus forcing them to _explain_ what they may (or may not) have copied.   There usually isn't time to cover everything, but if students know that they can be called on to present any of the problems on any given day, and that if they are called on and aren't prepared, they don't receive credit, that's pretty effective incentive.   I've not in the past relied on this model to the exclusion of problem sets, but I may give it a try this coming year.   I'd be interested in the wisdom and experience of those who implement something like this approach.

David Craig


<http://web.lemoyne.edu/~craigda/>