For all you nice physicists who are hitting the blog because of the shout-out in the AAPT e-NNOUNCER, just scroll down three blog posts to find my listing of all my posts from AAPT.

I welcome guest posts about sessions that I didn’t make it to! Just drop me a note at stephanie (at) sciencegeekgirl (dot) com.

I’ve been meaning to post these for a while.  I gathered a fun set of quotable quotes while at the American Association of Physics Teachers conference a few weeks ago.

“Who remembers our wisdom?” David Pritchard (The answer?  The people who use it.  Physics majors retain their problem solving knowledge more than English majors, three years later).

“Use it or lose it” – David Pritchard (in reference to the fact that physics majors get better at problem solving over time, but English majors don’t)

“If we try to force our students into the mold we had when we were in school, we’ll lose them – except for the few who are good enough that they’ll succeed regardless of what we do.” – Cathy Ezrailson

“The pedagogy is not the technology” – Ed Price

“Pretty good isn’t enough” – Ed Price (regarding choice of tech tools for the classroom)

“If you want your students to tweet you well, you need to tweet them well” – me!  (regarding respectful use of social media in the classroom)

“The best way to convince your students that you actually care about them, is to actually care about them” – William Hogan

Q:  Can you offer your definition of hidden curriculum? A: No.  That would be being explicit.

“Where do you think intuition comes from?  Please answer intuitively.” – Rachel Scherr

Just a little promo fora recent post I wrote at The Active Class on Online Office Hours (thanks to Rhett of DotPhysics for the suggestion).  Here’s a sneak preview:

I recently sat in on a series of workshops for newer faculty at the university, and was surprised by a resounding theme among those academics in those first stressful years:  How do I get students to email me less?  I hadn’t realized the full flooding impact that instructors face with emailed questions from the multitudinous hordes.

I’m not sure I have the be-all-end-all answer to this challenge, but one option that I have heard praised by instructors is that of online office hours.  If students are emailing because the in-person office hours are inconvenient because of location and/or times, then online office hours could be of some assistance in reducing the deluge. … From an article in the Cornell Sun:

“Usually it comes down to some last-minute thing. If the student has questions, it’s far easier for me to IM them rather than to do an exchange of six different emails back and forth” [said Prof. David Williamson at Cornell.]

Holding office hours online could have other benefits:

• You won’t have to come to campus to talk to your students.
• If discussions are archived, then students who weren’t able to attend can benefit from peers’ questions and discussions.
• All students in the office hour can participate and discuss with one another, instead of waiting in a line outside the instructor’s door to get individualized attention for their question (which may be shared by others).
• You can offer hours at more popular times (such as evenings) when more students can attend.

Read more here

I blog on using technology to enhance student engagement over at The Active Class. My most recent post was about Ubiquitous Presenter — a free way to add interactive ink to your slides.  Here is an excerpt:

When the screen lights up, students take it as a cue to tune out.  We’ve all had this experience — we scan the slide, and while we wait for the presenter to read through their bulleted list, we daydream about what we’re having for dinner tonight.

We can combine the best of traditional chalk with Powerpoint, and use programs that allow you to ink up your Powerpoint interactively. This digital+interactive blend is the driver behind Smartboards and other interactive whiteboards, and with a tablet PC you can also add drawings and other annotations to slides.  I wanted to highlight one particularly  useful (free!)  tool that was designed by science education researchers, specifically for educators.    Ubiquitous Presenter is a free tool designed for use with a Tablet PC, to interactively ink slides, AND allow students to add their own ink from their seats.

Check out the whole post for more.

My fellow bloggers have got some good articles too, about how to use technology to add life to your lecture.  One recent post by SidneyEve Matrix suggests using the short 5-minute snazzy Ignite presentation style to jazz up your lectures and student presentation.  As an Ignite fan, I love it!

Got some topics or questions you think I should cover on that blog?  Please, let me know!

I’ve been really enjoying a blog put out by the University of Colorado’s ASSETT (Arts and Sciences Support of Education through Technology) program.  They have frequent posts on technology that relates to higher education, and how it really impacts your classroom.

For example, connecting with students by Facebook; considerations, or whether to mentor via FB — tools like Evernote for organizing your own thoughts and to do lists — or creating a class website using Blogger.  Though it’s written for Univ. of Colorado faculty, most posts are widely applicable.  And they’re short and to the point!

Want a benchtop SEM scan of your fingernail? This is too cool — a company called ASPEX will take an SEM scan of any object that you send them and pst it online.  You can certainly find some intriguing stuff lying around your home or office to scan and send to them!  Or how about having your students send in a few interesting things?  Here’s the link to past scans. They say:

You could send us a stray crumb from the bottom of your purse, a piece of lipstick, some leftover sushi…anything you’d like to see a picture of under a powerful microscope.

If you want to have something scanned, send in this form to ASPEX Corporation/ Free Sample Submissions/ 175 Sheffield Dr./ Delmont, PA 15626. The images and report will be posted on our website here in about two weeks.  Samples won’t be returned!

Here’s a list of 25 ways to use Twitter in the college classroom. Some were creative and interesting and gave some fodder for thought.

Select a topic relevant to what is being learned in class, then track it to see what news stories or conversations are revolving around that topic. Another way to use the tracking method is to track a word or phrase to see how it is being used by others. This is a great way to learn the nuances of words and phrases.

They mention using Twitter for conferences, which is something that I do avidly (and really the only time that I use Twitter a lot), though I’m not completely clear on how that’s used in a classroom.

Whether professor or student, whether attending or having to stay behind, anyone interested in following the activities and thoughts going on at professional conferences can stay connected through Twitter. Conference attendees can also participate in BackChatter, a Twitter game that draws those attending a conference into becoming interactive participants.

And here is a list of the top 25 movies for physics geeks. (What is up with the number 25??).  Of course you can also check out Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics for fun stuff to show in class.

Lastly, your school can win $3000 for creating an public service announcement about household pests. This is part of the National Pest Management Association’s non-profit activities.  Below is information:

PestWorldForKids.org, an educational children’s Web site developed by the National Pest Management Association (NPMA), today announced a national competition for students (grades 4 through to win $3,000 for one lucky school’s science department. The contest challenges teachers and their students to create educational Public Service Announcements (PSAs) that highlight the health and property risks posed by household pests such as rodents, ants, termites, cockroaches, stinging insects and ticks.

“Insects are incredibly interesting and fun to learn about in the classroom,” says Missy Henriksen, vice president of public affairs for NPMA. “It’s when they come indoors – into our homes and schools – that they become pests. We are excited to offer students the chance to learn about pests, while at the same time using their creativity to explore an important educational topic.”

We invite students in grades 4 through 8 to use their biology and entomology knowledge, as well as their creativity, to create educational public service announcements (PSAs) that discuss the health and property risks posed by household pests.   Additional information, including sample PSAs and lesson plans for creating PSAs, are available at www.PestWorldForKids.org.

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).

This session is about the state of affairs regarding women in physics and how we can address it.

Well, no surprise, there’s still a big disparity between the number of men and women in physics — we lose women from physics at every major transition — from HS to college, college to graduate school — and entering academia.  About 1/3 of HS physics teachers are women, but only 6% of full physics professors are women.

43% of married female physicists are married to physicists, but 6% of married male physicists are married to other physicists.  So, women are — half the time — trying to deal with a trailing spouse!

What about in the classroom?   Boys get higher grades in HS physics and women in college tend to earn higher grades than their male counterparts.  Women’s SAT scores, however, underpredict their grades in college.  In physics, however, women earn lower grades than men.  This appears to be affected by whether the professor is female, and whether the students had physics in HS (both improve women’s grades).  So, whereas women do better than men overall in college, that’s not true in physics! And they’re just not participating in physics to the same level as men.

This speaker claimed that the statement that women prefer interactive engagement techniques is actually not supported by research.  It’s true that poor teaching makes both men and women leave the sciences.  Does good teaching help?  Lorenzo, Crouch and Mazur (2006) reduced the gender gap (on the Force Concept Inventory) by using interactive engagement.  However, at Boulder (Pollock, Finkelstein and Kost, 2007) they found that this depended on the instructor, Jennifer Docktor found there was no instructor effect, and Eric Anderson found that interactive engagement didn’t help the gap.  Help!  It seems to be much more complicated than just “interactivity helps women learn.”  The jury is still out.

Ted Hodapp from the APS explained that women are actually doing pretty well in physics, though this is not true of minorities.  These are results from the APS Gender Equity conference.  Female PhD’s increase by 4% per year.  Hey, great, it’s going up!  Not by much, however, this isn’t true of minorities, for whom the curve is flat.  But only some people are getting to that point in the first place.  “Focus on elementary!” waved one woman from the back.  That’s where we’re losing women, is at the 4th and 5th grade.

The good news though is that women who DO finish their PhD are just as likely to be hired as men are.

In terms of Bachelor’s degrees, most science and engineering fields have seen a dramatic increase in the number of majors… but not physics (which is pretty flat.)

The results of the Gender Equity conference are numerous — you can download the report at the link.  You can also sign up to get the Gazette — a newsletter of the committee for the status of women in physics.

Some ideas are:

• Create a supportive climate for women, including transparency in policies and a “zero tolerance” policy for offensive comments
• Nominate women for prizes
• Stop the tenure clock for family leave

But see the report for more, those are just the ones I wrote down!

The nice thing about this session, I must say, was a great amount of thoughtful discussion and interjections from the audience, who is clearly informed and engaged in this topic.

Our education research group here at University of Colorado had a visit and a very interesting talk by Sanjoy Mahajan, director of the teaching and learning laboratory at MIT and former physics professor, last semester.  He focuses on understanding and improving students number sense, mostly through use of approximations and estimations.  He’s a very provocative fellow.  Here are some highlights from his message to us.

There are 26 sheep and 10 goats on a ship.  How old is the captain?

That was a question given to 2nd and 3rd graders in France back in the late 1970′s.  The answer, of course, is 36.  Or at least so stated most of the children who answered it.  Here’s an interesting writeup from a researcher who reports on several variations on that original experiment, with odd and disturbing results.  Children argued that the number of the flock determined the age of the shepherd, and if members of the flock ran away, then that affected the shepherd’s age!  Do click on that link above, it’s very interesting.  One of the researchers whose work he discusses said:

The students he interviewed not only failed to note the meaninglessness of the problems as stated but went ahead blithely to combine the numbers given in the problems and produce answers. They could only do so by engaging in what might be called suspension of sense-making – suspending the requirement that the way in which the problems are stated makes sense … There is reason to believe that such suspension of sense-making develops in school, as a result of schooling.

Here is another example, from Sanjoy Mahajan, about a lack of number sense.  In a national assessment of mathematics ability, students 13 and 17 years old were asked:

Estimate 3.04 x 5.3

It’s even easier than you think.  They were given a set of answer choices:

A) 1.6

B) 16

C) 160

D) 1600

E) No answer

Here are the responses of the students, 13 year olds and 17 year olds

A) 1.6        28% 21%

B) 16           21% 37%

C) 160        18% 17%

D) 1600      28% 11%

E) No answer 9% 12%

The conclusion I draw from this?  We’re doomed.  I mean, the 17-year olds did a little better than the 13 year olds, but not that much.  And get this!  70% of those students could correctly do the algorithmical multiplication problem. This isn’t a problem of multiplication.  It’s a deeper problem of not understanding our number system.

Students just wander around in a random walk in solution space, he says, until they get something that looks like an answer. And they put a box around it.  We’d rather, of course, that they have a guide, a sort of nose for where they should go in solving the problem.  Then a path to the solution will be more direct.  But that requires understanding, rather than rote learning.  Rote learning, believes Sanjay, is an evil thing to be eradicated from our learning system.  Not everyone in our group agreed.

In another example he gave, he demonstrated how much more comfortable students are with algorithmical numerical calculations than with other solution methods.  Even when a graph was right in front of them, demonstrating the answer to the question, they ground through the calculation.  Sanjay argues this shows a lack of reasoning and understanding.  Students have been taugh that numbers are a more valid way of reasoning, and that this is what teachers are looking for in answers, rather than pictures and graphs.

Or, how about this one.  You drop a ball on the table and it bounces.  What are the forces on the ball at the moment that it’s stationary on the table?  Think about it a moment.

Did you answer “mg”?  That’s what most students answer.  We’re so used to the normal force being equal to mg when items are stationary.  So, Sanjay has his students put out their hand on the table.  He places a rock on their hand.

Sanjay: What’s the force of the rock on your hand?

Student:  mg

OK, no problem.  Now he holds the rock above their hand and makes as if to drop it.

Sanjay:  Hey, why are you moving your hand?

He places the rock again on their hand.  “That’s what mg feels like.  Why are you afraid of mg?”

OK, so they decide it must not be mg.  It must be, maybe, 2mg.  That seems plausible, given all those momentum conservation problems they’ve done.  So he puts two rocks on their hand.  That’s 2mg. That still feels OK.  So it must be more than 2 mg.

Now that they have that physical intuition, he says, they’re ready to see the symbolic manipulation.

Here’s the answer as he described it.  Acceleration goes as the velocity of impact divided by the time of contact.  What is the time of contact?  The bottom of the ball hits the ground, but the top keeps going until it gets the signal that the bottom has hit, that there’s no more room to move down, and it’s time to start moving up.  That happens at the speed of sound.

So

Conclusion:  Ouch

Sanjay argued that doing this kind of qualitative reasoning is both a diagnostic tool (to see if students have understood you), a treatment (to get students thinking qualitatively) and fun. This gives students a tool to understand and estimate numbers in any problem, not just physics.  He wants them to have a feel for what’s going on before they start plugging in numbers.

I guess that I’m the last person to see this, but this YouTube video on digital technology and college education from Kansas State University made the rounds a while back.  It’s a very moving presentation of how distanced students feel from their own learning and the role that technology plays in that.

From a teacher’s perspective, there are some things that you can do to keep students on task and engaged in the classroom (and make that lecture more relevant to them).

On that note, I went to a nice presentation by Diane Sieber on “Facing Facebook” recently, talking about the challenges facing college instructors with the digital age.  How do you work with the technology instead of fighting it?

The results of a Pew research study in 2006 showed that, in class

• 80% of students access Facebook or MySpace
• 73% text message, IM or email
• 90% browse the web
• 45% read news or blogs
• 25% take notes
• 18% play online games

One thing that she does is to avoid Powerpoint at all costs.  Powerpoint just sucks the energy out of a room, she says, and students take it as a cue to tune out.  Powerpoint reduces complex ideas to simple slides, or at least students see them as reductive.  It also makes lecture scripted and linear — everything is in order and there is this “forced march” through the materials.  This kills any sense  that there’s a risk to not paying attention.  You might as well check your email and then download the powerpoints later.   She uses Mind Manager Pro to create a concept map of her lecture.

She didn’t encourage banning laptops, since that penalizes students.  Help students use their technology more productively, she says. There are some dirty rotten tricks, like using a “dummy” wireless router to draw wireless traffic from the main campus router to that non-internet connected router. You can also restrict laptops to the front row of class, but I’ve seen students still off-task with that method.

But more productively, she has the class create a social contract using an online wiki.  She uses the wiki throughout class, and the social contract is the first thing they do.  Then the whole class has bought in to the contract and enforces it.  That contract always ends up including something about the use of technology in the classroom.  After all, it’s distracting to other students if the student in front of them is surfing the net.

Just being aware, as an instructor, when people are looking at the screen and not touching the keyboard, can help.  Call students by name to draw their attention.  Walk around the class, beyond the first five rows.  Have “tops down” time when screens have to be down, signalling that this is an important topic, and breaking up the pace of class.  She even ran some performance correlations, showing that those students with laptops open during class had lower grades on the test –this was very surprising to students, and they changed their behavior.

These media can complement class activity, too, by assigning a student to googlejockey during class, or using tools such as ubiquitous presenter.