Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: [Phys-L] rote versus understanding ... grade versus understanding



Thank you for the thoughtful feedback, I’m interested to hear more.

I lost interest a long time ago in worrying about what students SHOULD do. (As John D has noted, this is probably not the same for every student anyhow.) I am more concerned with what they DO do, based on some years of observation and corresponding efforts to shape student responses to what is asked of them.

The best students by and large take care of themselves. It is the behavior of middling and even struggling students that I hope to socially engineer to achieve, to the greatest extent that I can, the outcome that I want: meaningful learning experiences. Across the board, but most especially in more advanced courses, my starting point is the premise that most meaningful learning in physics comes from DOING physics, usually through thoughtful engagement with problems and projects. I’d be hard to convince that problem sets, projects and the like are not ESSENTIAL to meaningful learning — though it might be interesting to hear arguments to the contrary. With that as my starting point, the question is then, what course structures are most effective at promoting genuine engagement (as opposed to simple answer-seeking) with the course material by MOST (likely never all) students in the course (not just the “good” ones.)

To observe that students “should” do this or that, for the love of learning or because it will help them in the future or because it’s part of being a mature learner or whatever else, may be valid — if a bit smug — but is not especially helpful. Rather, I contend that this is largely a structural matter. It’s not exactly revolutionary to note that students respond differently to different sets of requirements and expectations. What kinds of requirements and expectations are most effective at achieving the desired outcomes? John D is quite right that students often live up to our expectations, and indeed, those expectations are communicated, both directly and indirectly, by what a course asks of them. My aim in posting was to probe what others have learned about possible answers to this question.

My experience is that offering no incentive to do homework beyond the fact that they “should” do it to learn the material, or for fear of performing poorly on examinations, is simply not an effective means of achieving the desired outcomes with the majority of students, especially in advanced courses where that homework can be both challenging and time consuming. The good students are fine. The rest are not. Sure, maybe they’re not yet mature enough to make good decisions, and they should just shape and do what we think they should do, etc. and so on, but I believe that’s abdicating our responsibility to these students. How do we GET THEM to the point that (most of them) make better decisions about how they will approach their learning, beyond simply telling them to?

Testing is a separate issue, albeit connected. (Is the primary function of testing to assess what has been learned? To incentivize that learning? The answer has some bearing on how and what you test. And, of course, it may be that different kinds of testing in a course — e.g. quizzes and midterms — can be directed to different aims.) I agree completely with Dan’s comments on the subject, most especially the observation that tests are "an artificial environment that doesn't really mimic the environment in which I *want* my students to be able to perform well.” In short, I am not super interested in incentivizing test performance as a primary course outcome. It may be true that thoughtful engagement with the material to the point of understanding it is the best route to sound test performance, but this is a sufficiently indirect means of encouraging the desired engagement that, in my experience, it is not nearly as effective with the middle and bottom group of students. This is why I seek more direct inducements.

John D makes the useful suggestion to "pick an item from some N-days-old homework set and assign it as an in-class quiz,” possibly with an added twist to the question. Indeed, precisely this practice has proved to be one of the more effective tactics at achieving my aim of thoughtful engagement with course assignments. It can be, however, quite challenging to design such quizzes in advanced courses where even straightforward problems can involve significant investments of time. It has been amusing to observe that the better students are clever enough to cotton on to this and learn to study homework questions which are more likely to be “quizzable”. I can’t complain about this, really, because in the end it means they are *thinking* about the questions deeply enough to figure this out, which is a positive outcome.

John also suggests the interesting innovation of making the convolution interval between homework and quiz elastic. This is a delightful notion, and precisely the kind of idea I was hoping for when I posted the question. I look forward to more!

Thanks,
David


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