For those of you who wanted them all in one place (and I’m one of those people) here are all the posts that I wrote from the recent Physics Teacher AAPT/PERC physics teacher conferences:

1. Facing Facebook:  Social media in and out of the classroom
2. The Magic of the Middle Division: Changing Classroom Norms
3. Students’ understanding of energy:  Acting out our thinking
4. Students playing the “classroom” game can give silly answers
5. Out of one, many:  Five researchers analyze the same student video
6. Do students learn better with peer instruction?  Does it last?
7. Common challenges in using clickers
8. Effective use of technology in physics education
9. Some memorable quotes from AAPT
10. Student reasoning in tutorials

Enjoy!

I’ve posted several items about educational technology from AAPT on my other blog, TheActiveClass.  You can see those here:

• Do students learn better with peer instruction?  Does it last?
• Common challenges in using clickers
• Effective use of technology in physics education

Another post on today’s sessions at the AAPT…

In one talk on “epistemological priming” (Paul Hutchison, Grinnell), he made a compelling case for the fact that students aren’t using their everyday reasoning in physics class.  He asked them the question, “If you throw a ball horizontally, and a ball straight down, which will hit the ground first?”

Amazingly, a full 40% of his sample said that the one thrown horizontally will hit the ground first!  Any third grader, he said, will give the correct answer to this question (that the one thrown straight down will hit the ground first). So, the ones who give this “silly” answer, he says, are framing this task as an “answermaking” task – where their job is just to get the right answer and use whatever tricks they need to get there.  Since this question has some resemblance to the common physics demo, where a ball is thrown horizontally or dropped vertically, they try to make an answer from that previous information.  Those who answer correctly are in a “sensemaking” mode – they are reasoning through the question, in a variety of ways.  They think their task in physics class is to make sense of what is happening.  They found that they were able to prime students to answer in a certain way depending on how they led into the question.  Different types of initial questions primed the students to think about the thrown-ball question in one of those two ways.  This is good news, it means that if we want students to  engage in certain kinds of activities on the homework, perhaps we should make the first couple questions on the homework strongly leading in that direction.

A follow up talk by Mary McDonald, also at Grinnell, was cancelled, unfortunately, but she investigated what kinds of activities during groupwork can create an answermaking versus a sensemaking frame.  This would be helpful in determining what sorts of things we could emphasize when we’re watching students working together in groups, so that they engage more in making sense of what they’re doing.  My friend Sandy Martinuk (University of British Columbia) has created some interesting work in this area too – he found that students don’t connect what they’re learning to real-life when they’re doing a problem solving activity, even if it’s real-world (like context-rich problems).  They still seem to be engaged in answermaking in that task.  When they’re creating or inventing something by working together, however, they seem go to more into a sensemaking frame of mind.

Luckily, Sandy reads my blog, and hopefully can correct what I believe is a somewhat muddled description of his results!

Phew… end of Day 1… It’s been a very long day.  Stay tuned, tomorrow I’ll be presenting two talks — on clickers, and on social media in physics classrooms.  I’ll do my best to summarize those here!

Students are notoriously un-smart about their study habits.  We know that anecdotally, but we’ve also got some solid data to show how bad they are.  A lot of the problem is that we can fool ourselves into thinking we’ve learned something.  From one of the ACPEEP’s summary documents:

Many experiments have shown that repeated study opportunities can fool students into thinking they know material better than they do (as assessed by a production test, such as short answer or essay). Although the material may be familiar (and students may be able to pick out the correct answer on a multiple-choice test), they still may not be able to recall the material for tests that require production. Because rereading material and other common strategies (e.g., highlighting or underlining and then rereading the underlined material) increase fluency, students may be tricked into thinking they know the material better than they really do (Jacoby, Jones, & Dolan, 1998). The illusion of knowing that comes from rereading is particularly disturbing given student reports that rereading is their most frequent study strategy when preparing for a test – and oftentimes they only re-read the material they underlined during their initial reading (e.g., see Kornell & Bjork, 2007).

Here are a few examples:

-       Underlining words in a text increases your sense that you could retrieve this information, but it actually has no effect.  (Yet, of course, many students study by highlighting their textbooks!)

-       When self-testing, when we can remember something quickly we assume that we know it.  But in truth, the harder something is to recall, the more that thing becomes cemented in our mind.

-       When people see a bunch of things presented together (for example, show the paintings of one artist all in a row, and then another artist all in a row), they have the sense that they’ll do better on a test to identify the artist that created any individual painting.  But in truth, they did better when the paintings of different artists were scattered throughout the presentation (interleaving rather than massed).  Of course, when we study, we tend to study one topic or idea all at once, rather than interleaving it.  So, students are least satisfied with the most effective forms of instruction!

-       Students tend to be overconfident in their learning, leading them to stop studying earlier. So, feedback showing them just what they do and don’t know (like clickers or quizzes) is good in pointing out to them what they don’t know, so they can study more.

-       Students tend to study the things that they don’t know very well yet, but it will take them a lot of time to reach mastery on those items.  To get the most bang for their buck, they should probably study the things that they know well but haven’t quite mastered.  Those items, in the “zone of proximal learning” will only take a small amount of time to reach mastery, so it’s more efficient to study those items first.

If you’re interested more in the research on how students decide to study, see this important article: The Promise and Perils of Self-Regulated study by Kornell and Bjork (PDF here), and a great article directed to students, explaining the important findings of cognitive psychology:  How to Succeed in College, Learn How to Learn (PDF here).

Photo:  Patrick Hannigan on Wikimedia

I’m in a three day mini-conference right now, with a bunch of psychologists, and a ton of undergraduate education reformers like me.  The psychologists are all cognitive psychologists (i.e., they deal with how people think), and they’re part of a consortium called Applying Cognitive Psychology to Enhance Educational Practice (ACPEEP).  It’s a star-studded show, including Henry Roediger (though he actually couldn’t make it this week), Robert and Elizabeth Bjork, and Janet Metcalfe, among others.  We’re spending three days talking about how undergraduate education reform can take tips and tricks from what we know about how people think and learn.  I’m sure I’ll have more than one blog post from this conference, but let’s start with the main principles that they communicated to us in the first day.

1. Testing helps you learn

I’ve blogged about this before (here and here).  The act of taking a test can be a learning experience, not just a way to assess you on what you already know.  One of the main reasons, they hypothesize, is that the act of retrieval strengthens the neuronal connections.  That seems to fit with the fact that multiple choice tests aren’t as strong of a learning experience as are short-answer tests (McDaniel et al, 2007).  Another concern of multiple choice tests is that there is some evidence that getting the wrong answer can introduce wrong information (Roediger and Marsh, 2005).   So, Elizabeth Bjork said, this suggests that we have to construct our alternatives to our multiple-choice tests carefully – so that the alternative, “wrong” answers require students to recall information in order to reject them.  This has obvious implications for both the use of clickers, and the construction of the alternative answers on clicker questions.

2.  Spaced studying

A ton of evidence shows that you remember things longer if you space out your study sessions.  That means studying for the exam for a week or so, in multiple sessions, rather than cramming the night before.  But how long of a gap is optimal between study sessions, to increase how long you remember the information?  The current research seems to suggest that the longer you want to remember something, the longer the study gap should be.  So, if you want to remember something for a few years, you probably need a few months’ gap between study sessions.  This suggests that cumulative finals are probably a great thing, since you have to study for the midterm, and then for the final, with a gap of several months.

But there must be a point of diminishing returns – spaced testing/studying helps you learn, but at what point does this testing take up more time than it’s worth in terms of how much more you’re learning?  As Kathryn Rawson told us, “More is better, but more is increasingly less better.”  So, to be efficient, you don’t want to over-study.  If she had to give tentative quantitative numbers, she suggested that students should study until they’d been able to correctly recall the answer three times in their initial study session, and then follow this with three more spaced sessions over time.

3.  Desireable difficulties

The idea of “desireable difficulties” is that you don’t learn if something is too easy.  Certain difficulties help you learn.  For example, if you study in the same place all the time, then your learning might be highly contextualized, and thus you won’t do as well on the test.  A desireable difficulty is to study in multiple places.  Another desireable difficulty would be spacing out your study sessions, instead of cramming.  However, a lot of these strategies don’t produce quick learning, so people don’t use them.  We cram for a test because it does work, at least to be able to recall the information in the short-term.  But these “easy” strategies (like massed practice/”cramming”) don’t create long-term learning.

I recently started blogging for The Active Class – a blog run by i>clicker, our local favorite brand of “clicker” or classroom response system. (Why do we like it?  It’s simpler and easier to use than most systems, so easy to get a bunch of different faculty on board with it.  And it has a lot of functions that make it easier to use with peer instruction, like the ability to sneak a peek at the histogram without showing it to your students).

My first post — Another trendy technical gadget!? is an introductory post on how clickers can help students learn.  In other words, what makes them a useful tool, not just an expensive gadget.

Just what does the clicker buy you over a simple hand-raise?

It depends.  If you’re using it to take attendance – not much.  If you’re using it for quizzes, then it’s just easier for you, come grading time.

But the best use of clickers isn’t for attendance or quizzes – it’s to deeply engage your students in the subject.  Can you do this in other ways?  Sure!  But with clickers, you get a lot of bang for your buck – more so, perhaps, than the pricey textbooks students lug from class to class, only to throw out next semester. As my colleague Mike Dubson told me, “I can think of no other device that accomplishes so many benefits in a single package.”

Read the whole post here.

A few neat gleanings from my favorite blogs:

Over at Schooner of Science — Smelling the Moon. A fictional pregnant woman swears she can smell moonbeams.  Do pregnant women really smell things more strongly?

What’s really cool is that the women THINK they smell better now they are pregnant, but there’s not the evidence there to say that this is REALLY the case. Is it just that this test wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up the change in smell which seems so noticeable to the smeller, or do they just feel like things smell different now? Is there a change, and does it effect the nose or the brain? Science, alas, is yet to have an answer.

Smelling moonbeams seems a little far-fetched though. But if you’re curious on what the moon smells like, astronauts say it smells like burnt gunpowder. After a moonwalk the dust sticks to their clothes and they say it smells very strong (they’ve even, accidentally I’m sure, tasted some!) Once the dust gets back to Earth it doesn’t smell anymore. Weird, right?

From Cognitive Daily – Chocolate improves upon a positive mood. A group of volunteers watched either a happy, upsetting, or neutral movie scene.

Then half the volunteers were given a piece of chocolate, and the unlucky second group got a glass of water. 1 minute later, they reported their mood once again. This was repeated for each clip (the clips were shown in a random order for each participant)…. the effect of chocolate depends on the type of movie the viewers watched. If the movie was sad, then eating chocolate led to a significant improvement in mood, significantly better than water. For a happy film, there was no improvement in mood, and the difference between chocolate and water was only marginally significant. For a neutral movie, there was no significant difference in the effect of chocolate and water.

Derek Bruff in Teaching with Classroom Response Systems talks about his use of pre-class reading quizzes using clickers:

All that active learning during class must mean you can’t cover all the same content, right?  Although I find the term “cover” problematic, I understand these questions. …  One response is to move some of the learning that would have taken place during class to out-of-class time.  One way to do this is by having our students read their textbooks before class, which I’ve done in my math courses for several years now. …. However, since studies show that only about 30% of students will read their textbooks before class without some kind of incentive, it’s helpful to have students complete pre-class reading quizzes online.  This semester, I’m having my students do so via our course blog.

Cocktail Party Physics has a great set of tips for scientists to make sure that journalists report accurately on their science (spurred by the New York Times article suggesting that electrons are uncharged).  And Ms. Ouellette took a break from finishing her book to write about calculus anxiety and girls:

A geometry teacher tells the entire class that the girls would probably do the worst in his course because they lacked spatial reasoning ability. A guidance counselor shunts female students into “practical math” classes where they learn how many ham slices each guest would need at a wedding. A physics professor insists on checking his female students’ work before they can leave the lab, yet doesn’t feel the need to check the work of his male students. A computer science professor dismisses any questions from female students as “lazy little girl whining.” And a calculus teacher thinks it’s perfectly appropriate to measure his female students’ bodies and use those measurements as part of his volume calculations in class.

Dot Physics has a delightful rant about podcasting of university lectures:

If all you (as an instructor) are doing is stuff that could be a podcast, then why not have it as a podcast? …The above article mentions that some professors have their lectures on iTunes university, but limit the number of downloads to encourage students to come to class. I don’t get it. If they can get everything they need from the podcast, why come to class?

I think technology is cool. However, just using technology because you can is a bad idea. In this, case, I don’t think the technology is used incorrectly. If you have a class that is just a lecture, the podcast makes a lot of sense. You can pause it and replay it. That should be useful. The problem is (in my opinion) with classes that can be podcasted. Maybe there is a need for some classes that have very low level learning (like memorizing stuff), but I think there should be more classes that engage students at a higher level.

Hear hear!  He even advocates using clickers.  Go Rhett.  And more recently he has a nice post about clickers — how they’re used, and some low tech alternatives.

The Artful Amoeba has some beautiful pictures of fungi (and gorgeous prose to tell us about them).  She also writes about the (now somewhat old news) of the first video of giant squid:

Why is it incredible we only recently recovered images and film?

Scientists have known for over a century that giant squid from the beaks and pieces they dredged out of sperm whale stomachs. Dead specimens had washed up on shores in Newfoundland and New Zealand, from which one lucky specimen even made it to the Rev. Moses Harvey’s bathtub.

Bathtub technology has advanced considerably since 1873.

Because these creatures live in one of the most inacessible habitats on Earth — the cold, black benthic zone — live specimens eluded photography (and, for the most part, capture) for another 125 years.

As worrisome as all I’ve said so far may be to consider were one, say, out on a pleasure swim at 1,500 meters in squid-infested waters, consider this: not only is the colossal squid considerably larger and bulkier than the giant squid (although its arms are generally shorter), it also possesses hooks on its tentacles. Some swivel. Some have multiple prongs.

*Shudder*

And lastly, the Science and Entertainment exchange found a neat YouTube video with a review of clips of special effects since 1900. Very neat.

No, of course not.  But to hear us education folks prattle on, you’d think that an instructor who lectures to their students is doing them a grave disservice.

Well, if all they’re doing is lecture, then their students could be getting more bang for their buck.  But lecturing is perhaps an indispensable part of class, especially in large college courses.  I’m reading a great article right now on how to make lectures more effective — here are some tidbits from that article (P.A. deWinstanley and R. A. Bjork, “Successful Lecturing:  Presenting Information in Ways that Engage Effective Processing,” in Applying the Science of Learning to University Teaching and Beyond).

Firstly, people need to be active in order to learn.

Toward achieving the goal of having students actually learn during lectures, it is important to remind ourselves of some fundamental properties of humans as learners. Learning does not happen, for example, through some kind of literal recording process. Rather, learning is an interpretive process: new information is stored by relating it to, or linking it up with, what is already known.

So, in lecture, we need to be able to spark the kinds of cognitive processes that actually help people learn.  For one, students’ attention can’t be divided if they’re to fully process what we’re trying to teach.  But Powerpoint and other tools require students to both attend to something visual (the screen) while they process something auditory (what we’re saying).  The end result seems to be that students think they understand, but can’t actually recall the material on the test  (Note the implications for students’ tendency to multitask during class!)  That’s horrible — students leave with the impression that they don’t need to study because they know the material, but they really don’t.

It’s also important that students, once their attention is directed, have a chance to interpret and elaborate upon what is presented in lecture.  New information has to be fit in with what a student already knows.  A graph, for example, isn’t easily memorized.  But once a student has determined what that visual information represents, and used it to answer a question, he will more likely recall the graphic or its message.

In order to remember information, it’s also important that students be given a chance to generate and retrieve that information.  The act of recall strengthens neuronal connections, creating learning.  That’s why it’s helpful to test oneself when studying for a test (and this is useful even if you aren’t given the answers about whether you’re right or not, though feedback is more helpful).  Producing information helps us learn more than being presented with that information.  Even something as simple as having to fill in missing blanks in a word (eg., “try to incorporate g-n-r-t-ng into your lecture”) results in better learning than reading that same word in bold (eg., “try to incorporate generating into your lecture.”)  Of course, the use of personal response systems (“clickers”) fulfills this end very nicely.

A few presentation tips from the article:

Space repetitions of information across lectures.  Long term recall is improved when information is spread out over time.  That’s why it’s better to study over several days, rather than cram the night before the test.

Show key concepts in several different ways. This is termed “encoding variability,” and gives students a chance to learn the material in more than one way, which helps them generalize what they’ve learned.

Provide structure. This is the goal of the ubiquitous outline we see in talks, lectures, syllabi, etc.  Some studies have found that students learn a lot from filling in an instructor-prepared outline of lecture notes (eg., headings and subheadings), rather than taking lecture notes on a blank piece of paper.  Concept maps are also useful ways of helping students see the big picture.

Use visuals and mnemonics. This is another way of increasing encoding variability, or the different ways in which students process the information that’s being presented.  Vivid examples and analogies can help, as can graphs, figures, or having students produce their own diagrams.  Enthusiasm and humor, well-placed, can also serve as a mnemonic.

Ask students questions. Ask students questions in class, and require them to give the reasons behind their answers.  Again, clicker questions are a great way to do this, and to make sure every student has a chance to explain their reasoning (at least to their peers).  To get the real benefit here, the questions have to be genuine questions, not rhetorical.  So many instructors ask a question, and then answer it themselves, lulling students into a certain passivity.

So, there are many ways to make lecture an extremely positive learning experience for our students.  But simple enthusiasm and clear explanations aren’t enough.

Here is the original chapter if you’d like to read it.

(P.A. deWinstanley and R. A. Bjork, “Successful Lecturing:  Presenting Information in Ways that Engage Effective Processing,” in Applying the Science of Learning to University Teaching and Beyond).

Today’s session is about using interactive lecture demonstrations to effectively improve your students’ understanding of concepts.

As I mentioned in my previous post, while students like demos, they don’t get the things we want them to get unless they predict the results of the experiement or somehow get involved.  David Sokoloff showed how they have used interactive lecture demonstrations in their classrooms, for example, with the standard demonstration where a lens makes an imagine of a candle.  What happens when you cover over half the lens?  Most students say that half the image will go away, but the true answer is that it gets dimmer.  They first describe the experiment, ask students to predict the results on their own, and then discuss with their neighbors, then show the results. Sometimes it’s a physical demonstration, sometimes there will be computer data involved (such as graphing the capacitance and voltage of a real circuit).  They’ve started using clickers (i>clicker) and are looking for people who would like to use some of their clicker interactive lecture demonstrations — email him at sokoloff @ uoregon dot edu.  Sounds like a great addition to an intro physics course!

There are a lot of recommendations and research on the interactive lecture demo approach in Redish’ book.

Jason Kahn (Tufts) presented some results from a conceptual evaluation showing that students do MUCH better on conceptual questions related to these topics after interactive lecture demonstrations.  However, the learning gains don’t seem quite as high when they use clickers.  They conjecture that the clickers don’t require students do actually do ray tracing, etc., as much as when they don’t have clickers.  (My thought on that is that you shouldn’t present the clicker answer choices until they’ve done the ray tracing and other cognitive work required to arrive at an answer).  That’s why they’re looking for people to try this in their course, so they can try to replicate these results.

Several other speakers talked about using interactive lecture demonstrations in their classrooms, and emphasized that it’s important to use them in the way intended by the developers, that it takes class time, but students respond positively to them.  They are more likely to talk to each other and to ask questions.

One speaker discussed how they use video analysis software to analyze digital videos, which they often use in conjunction with interactive demos. You can see their materials here.

This session is about how using discrepant (or “surprising”) events to teach physics

There’s quite a bit of evidence showing that students don’t really get what we want them to get from demonstrations, but they do like them.  They get a lot more out of them if we ask them to predict the results of the demonstration in advance.  The Detroit area physics teachers went a step further and gave a popular session on “discrepant events” — using demonstrations with surprising results and asking students to first predict what will happen.  He often phrases the questions as mutliple choice and students vote with a show of hands (though clickers could be a great way to do this too).  You can find these at dmapt.org. Here are some examples:

Hoop and a disk

When you roll a hoop and a disk down a ramp, which one will win?  It’s the disk, because it’s harder to get going because it has a higher moment of inertia.  He had a few variations on this — a disk and a sphere, same mass (sphere wins), or a large sphere (2M) and a small sphere (M) (both roll at the same rate).

Springs

When you hang two masses from a bar using springs, and let one mass bounce, what will happen to the other mass?  (they resonate, so the 2nd mass starts to bounce and the 1st mass slows.  What if we change the 2nd mass so it’s not the same as the first mass?  We don’t get resonance in that case.  What if we use 2M on one spring, and make the 1st spring twice as long?  We get resonance again!

Projectile motion

We manage to hit one of those little troll dolls (a “conTROLLed experiment?”) with a ball launched from a little ball launcher.  If he changes the angle, will he still hit the doll?  Well… he cheated… the ball launcher has an angle-o-meter on the back, and he used comlementary angles (eg., 60/30) to manage to hit the target even with the changed angle.  A good activity for the first day of class.

Bike tire

Suspend a bike wheel from a string and get it spinning vertically.  What will happen when you let it go?  (It keeps spinning and precesses).  This one’s hard to describe in words…