One of the things that’s puzzling to anyone, and especially us logic-oriented scientists, is how people can look at strong evidence and seemingly ignore it.  They go with their gut, or what they think they know, instead of the data staring them in the face.

This is the basis of a huge amount of work in what is called behavioral economics — or, the psychology of why we make the economic decisions that we do.  There’s a great article and radio piece on NPR about Daniel Kahneman’s work in economics, which won him the Nobel Prize in 2002.  For instance, we have the illusion of validity (we have too much confidence in our own judgment), or the anchoring effect (we’re unduly influenced by numbers that we’re exposed to, such as a “compare to” price on an item).

Here are some classic examples, as written in an email from Nathan Lasry:

1- A group is given the price of an object they must buy. The same object can be purchased 5$ cheaper across town (remember this is 5$ in the late 70s early 80s, so was worth much more than today’s 5$). The question: Would you drive across town to get the object?

Most people said YES to driving across town IF they were saving 5$ on a 15$ calculator.
Most people said NO to driving across town IF they were saving 5$ on a 125$ coat.

The trouble? When you walk into the grocery store to spend that 5$, it really doesn’t matter where it came from…
This result does not fit at all with classical economic theory that portrays humans as ’spock-like’ rational agents that would place an absolute value on driving across town.

2- In another interesting example, people were asked:
Do you prefer getting $1000 with 100% certainty or getting a 50% chance of receiving $2500. Most will choose the certain $1000, although the expectation value of the second option is higher 1250$.  This is ok from a strictly rational perspective because these folks are willing to pay 250$ as ‘insurance’. So you can call them ‘Risk aversive’.
BUT
The same people are then asked what they would choose between a certain loss of $1000 versus a 50% chance of either loosing nothing or loosing $2500.  Most will choose the riskier 50% alternative. So the SAME ‘risk averse’ people in the first example become ‘risk seeking’ in the second.

These, and all sorts of other biases, are outlined in a great book I’m listening to right now, How We Decide.  A lot of the themes from this book keep cropping up in my favorite podcast, Radio Lab, especially their recent episode on Choice. If you find this stuff interesting, check out the work of Baba Shiv, who sticks his subjects into MRI machines to see the hardwiring underlying how emotions affect our decisions.  He was the one who did the famous study showing that people not only rated the same wine more highly when told it was expensive, but actually had a better subjective experience of the wine based on their expectations.  And here is a TED talk by Dan Ariely on how our irrationality is predictable, and we can be encouraged or discouraged from cheating with some simple manipulations, like being reminded of an honor code, or replacing cokes with dollars.  He calls this our “buggy moral code.”

Another book that comes highly recommended is  Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
Here’s some stuff covered in that book (as written in an email from Bill Goffe):

- halo effect: attractive people are seen as better teachers, they earn more, etc. (presumably halos from non-people have an impact too)

- priming: what is in your mind when a second topic comes up is likely to color how you view or judge the second. Marcus gives this example: you ask undergrads how happy they are and how many dates they had last month. If the happiness question is asked first, there is no correlation between the answers. If if you first ask about dates, there is a correlation between the answers.

- anchoring and adjustment (a variation on priming): a number that people have in mind influences their estimate of something entirely different. One example: add 400 to the last three digits of your phone
number. Then, when did Attila the Hun’s rampage end? If the phone answer was less than 600, the median guess was A.D. 629, if the sum was between 1,200 and 1,399, the median year was A.D. 979.

- mere familiarity: people prefer what they know. Marcus reports one study (now done in 12 languages) that people prefer letters in their own names. One study told half the participants that feeding alley cats were legal and the other half were told it was illegal. Yet, most favored the current policy, whichever it might be.

- threat: the more we are threatened, the more we cling to our beliefs. I could imagine that this comes up in the physics classroom when beliefs about mechanics are challenged.

- confirmation bias: we tend to be place more weight on evidence that supports our beliefs than evidence that doesn’t (I think this one is widely known); the flip side is “motivated reasoning.”

This examination of the irrationality of people’s economic behavior was apparently pretty controversial stuff in economics, whose models assumed that humans are essentially rational and logical decision makers who will make the choices that benefit them the most.

But there’s probably another reason for economists’ resistance. An imperfectly rational human being challenges a really important idea: the notion that markets work well because individuals can be counted on to make the best choice for themselves.

“Merely accepting the fact that people do not necessarily make the best decisions for themselves is politically very explosive. The moment that you admit that, you have to start protecting people,” Kahneman says.

In other words, if the human brain is hard-wired to make serious errors, that implies all kinds of things about the need for regulation and protection.

In our own work in educational research and reform, this has many implications as well.  After all, we’re often presenting faculty with data and information at how students learn best, and meeting great resistance.

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I’ve got a new podcast posted, this one with my esteemed colleague Valerie Otero of the University of Colorado at Boulder.  She tells us why she thinks that the idea of student “misconceptions” is very dangerous — and gives us a new way to think about student ideas in the classroom, and some activities to address them.  This is in the Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears episode on Keeping Warm, and targets common student ideas about heat.  Still, the general message about misconceptions is, I think, one that every teacher should hear.

Listen to Warm Blankets and Cold Breezes (10 minutes)

You can also read this month’s content article on heat (what is it?  How do people and animals keep warm?) written by moi.

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If you’re a teacher — of physics, or any other physical science — and haven’t yet picked up a copy of Edward Redish’s Teaching Physics with the Physics Suite , I’m making a bid right now that you do so.

I finally read it — really read it — instead of just browsing through a chapter that I needed to reference for a paper.  For a slim volume, it is a surprisingly powerful compilation of effective teaching techniques based on research, and what you as an instructor need to do in order to implement them to their maximum power.

First he goes through a wonderfully succinct summary of what cognitive research can tell us about teaching — the book is worth buying just for these 30 clear pages.

He goes on to discuss exams and homework — the goals of assessment and different types of questions.  He has a resource CD with a bunch of research based surveys, like the Force Concept Inventory, or different attitude surveys.  He then gives a quick look at some of the major research-based teaching methods, like Peer Instruction (PI), Interactive Lecture Demonstrations (ILDs), Tutorials, and Just In Time Teaching (JiTT).  It’s certainly more useful for teachers of physics (at any level) but I think that most people teaching the physical sciences will come away with something useful from the book.

Here’s a gem.

I had been teaching for 20 years before I realized that when students asked me questions, I was responding as a student rather than as a teacher.  Having been a student for 20 years, having been rewarded for giving good answers to teachers’ questions, and having been successful at getting those rewards, I had a very strong tendency to try to give the best answer I could to any question posed.  Once I realized (embarassingly late in my teaching career) that the point was not getting the question answered correctly but getting the student to learn and understand, I shifted my strategy.

Now, insted of answering students’ questions directly, I try to diagnose their real problem.  What do they know that they can build an understanding on?  What are they confused or wrong about that is going to cause them trouble?  As a result, instead of answering a question right off, I ask some questions back.  Often, I discover that students are trying to hide a confusion by creating questions that sound as if they know what they are talking about.  Helping them to find resources within themselves that they can bring to bear often makes all the difference.

Redish, “Teaching Physics with the Physics Suite,” (2003), p. 190.

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This post is based on ideas from a presentation by Rachel Scherr of the University of Maryland and Seattle Pacific University.

Teachers, Rachel says, are disenfranchised.  Just as students who have no voice in what and how they learn in the classroom, professional development is often inflicted upon teachers who have no voice in the process.  Just like disenfranchised low-income students can be empowered, economically, by learning mathematics (see Radical Equations), science can be a gateway for teachers to become professionally empowered.

At Pacific Seattle University they do some rather radically different things for teacher professional development in order to attain this goal.  To start, they take them out of the classroom.  The kinds of conversations that happen once you’re out in the world are different.  Robert Moses, a teacher in Cambridge, takes his middle school students on a field trip onto the subway system.  The subway map can become an analogy for a number line, with the stops equivalent to positive and negative numbers.  (This is from the Algebra Project, a revolutionary project to bring math to inner city kids in a way they can relate to).  How can we create this kind of empowering revolution for teachers?

Their entire professional development curriculum is based on this idea — they ask teachers to create and represent physical ideas on their own.  This is basically interactive engagement, but specifically with allowing some freedom on the teachers’ part. For example, teachers came up with the primary features of energy, and decided on the most important ones.  They made drawings and diagrams to explain how energy is transferred from a person’s hands to a box to create motion when the box is pushed.  They did a little bit of “energy theater” where people played the role of different types of energy (so that teachers would start to see energy as a thing.

I like what they’re doing, and the point.  I don’t think that this is the only way to do it (“social construction of knowledge.”).  I think it’s really hard to do education in a way that is empowering and respectful for participants.  That’s why I’ve loved doing teacher professional development.  Science teachers are a very forgiving and curious group of people, and willingly engage in this kind of activity.  They’re so interested in it all.  Rachel was very enthusiastic about the amazing quality of the representations that teachers came up with, and how much they learned from constructing their own knowledge. They want teachers to both value development of rich content knowledge for themselves (and thus their students) and to recognize themselves (and thus their students) as intelligent agents whose ideas merit careful attention and who can figure things out.

Tough job for the teachers teaching these courses for teachers!  Kudos to Hunter and Eleanor Close.  But maybe even harder job for the teachers to implement these ideas in their classroom.  When they got their Foss Kits (kits for teaching a certain topic in the classroom) they went right back to their normal style of pedagogy – a tendency that a lot of professional development folks struggle with.  And one teacher explicitly said, “How much of this stuff am I expected to be able to do in my classroom before I get fired??”

Teachers need to navigate within the existing system, and doing these more open-ended activities is tough within that structure.  Of course, if students had learned their science better in 5th grade, then 8th grade teachers wouldn’t have to re-teach these topics, so they would end up saving time in instruction.  But, that kind of change will only happen after many years.  <sigh>  Reform is long and slow.

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Image from http://www.colorado.edu/MCEN/flowvis/

Our most famous fluids tend to be transparent — air and water, for example.  This makes it hard for us to imagine how fluids are moving as members of the general public, but also poses an interesting problem for budding engineers.  They need to know how to make fluids do what they want them to do.  So, Jean Herzberg in the Mechanical Engineering teaches a flow visualization course here at CU.  She does it in a fairly novel way, as a hands-on art and science course.

There’s a lot here.  Some of the things she covers are photographic techniques, flow visualization techniques, some of the physics and phenomenology of fluids such as fluid rotation.  She spends a lot of time on cloud physics.  “I’ll never be able to ignore the sky again,” says one participant.   But interestingly she also spends some time on the history of photography, which has evolved from a science to an art.

This is the only course in existence on flow visualization!  (and it shows up first in Google searches for “flow visualization”.) She gets some envy from colleagues when she presents her results at conferences, whose courses tend to be highly mathematical. It’s unusual to mix art and science in quite this way, in which art students are expected to document and experiment, whereas the engineering students are expected to create expressive images with impact.  The idea that engineers could learn something by creating something themselves is unheard of, and this enrages her.  And in the end, the engineers create images that are just as compelling and indistinguishable from those of the artists.

In the experiments that students develop at home, they use everyday household fluids, which are environmentally benign.  Usually toxic materials are used in laboratory courses, which is really unnecessary.  She finds that she can’t explain the unusual physics of some of their observations.  It’s also challenging because the exact properties of many of the materials used, such as food coloring and WD40.  Combustion and fluorescence, she says, are always popular (natch). For example, one group wanted to make green flame, so poured flaming methanol in boric acid.  Another made a negative image of smoke changing from laminar to turbulent flow as it exited the mouth.  The images she showed us were from her 2009 class which will be on the web shortly, but in the meantime you can see many amazing student images in their galleries.  The artistry of these images is astounding — the play of light and color, the use of humans as backdrops but using fluid flow as the main focus of the image.  The science of the images is also compelling.  One group of students discharged a fire extinguisher underwater, and saw three phases of matter (solid, liquid, gas) within that image.  A Tesla coil arcing through the air shows interesting patterns, showing discontinuities in the breakdown of air.

Students also take many images of clouds as part of their assignments, which are also on the gallery page.  Anyone who lives in Boulder knows that it’s an amazing spot for clouds — with the Rockies nearby and some interesting atmospheric conditions we get some curious clouds that I’ve never seen anywhere before.

What is the impact of this course on her students?  She finds, anecdotally, that students experience life-altering changes after the course, and her surveys show that students’ beliefs and attitudes change to be more enthusiastic about fluid flow and they notice fluid flow in everyday life.  (Why doesn’t she see this kind of change in her traditional engineering courses?)  She sees changes in students perceptions of the discipline and the physics.  Students feel better about the material — they see fluids as beautiful, interesting, useful, and fun.  Traditional fluid mechanics course students have negative responses on most of these — they see fluids as not beautiful, useful, and it’s not something they feel able to do.  This reminds me of my time at the Exploratorium, where I was first exposed to the incredible aesthetics of science, and the intersection between art and science.  I began to notice all sorts of little, beautiful things — the cracks in the sidewalk, light on a puddle, swirls of milk in my coffee.  I still do.  Life-altering experiences?  You betcha.

This is another kind of way of knowing fluid mechanics.  These students could probably point to the sky and explain things about fluid mechanics that those who learned to do the calculations can’t.  Note, however, that the engineering students in this flow visualization course have already taken the calculational fluid mechanics course.  I wonder, how would students in the traditional fluid mechanics course see that course differently if they took this visualization course first?

Note that this is not unrelated to my earlier post on Seeing the Unseen and Flow Visualization Video.

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Blogging from the Colorado Teaching and Learning with Technology (COLTT) conference.  This session, from Joni Dunlap, how to promote discussion in online courses.

How can we get learners to talk in online discussions, and how can we get the chatty students to shut up?  The results have been pretty disappointing so far.  Most instructors set up a discussion forum, and ask students to post an original post and to comment on two other posts.  But instructors complain that students are doing the minimum and the discussions aren’t exciting.  But what are they assessing?  They’re just counting how many posts each student gives.  The discussions, hence, are seen as tedious busywork.

So, there are three things to do to get good online discussion:

1. Relevance (what’s the point? Why are we doing this?)
2. Expectations (what are the rules?  How are we assessed?)
3. Preparation (what is an online discussion?  How do we talk online?)

Getting started.

First, she says, you have to create online community.  She asks them to share something special about themselves (eg., “I was held up at gunpoint”) or “what are your superhero powers?” or “share two songs that represent your present, past, and future”)  She uses Voicethread (an online tool for discussing images and ideas, which can be integrated with Moodle) and students can either add their comment as text (which appears under their picture) or as a small video.  These help get their collective feet wet in a playful way where they’re not being judged.

Provoking discussion.

A lot of the unsucessful ways that people start discussions are to ask, for example, give three comments on the reading on page 5.  How boring!  Discussion needs to be sparked with something provocative.  For example, “give three reasons why the author is dead wrong” or “students just aren’t as motivated as they used to be.  Comment.”  Don’t just ask students if they agree with the author where they can answer yes or no.  Ask them why they think the author wrote what he wrote and what their own viewpoint is.  Ask real discussion questions!

Guidelines

The guidelines for how to create online discussions are important to set up in advance. Setting up roles and responsibilities with a protocol can be helpful in making it clear what you expect of students, and makes treatment of students equitable and make the participation meaningful.

1. Group size. She suggests 10-15.  Though, I know that in small group work in class, the ideal size is 4-5, so I wonder if this holds online?
2. Assigned roles (eg., assigned reader, see below).
3. Limit number and length. This can keep a student to posting a certain number of words so that one student doesn’t come in an post an overwhelming amount of information, turning off other students from discussion.  She suggests 350 words per posted quotes and 250 word responses.  The originator can react to the comments ith up to 250 words.  This can be assessed by the instructor by eye rather than by actually counting words.  This helps students learn to share an idea in a short amount of text, as well.  Most students don’t have trouble writing enough words, but rather keeping it short enough!
4. Wait to step in. This can be a challenge!  The discussion can get truncated if the instructor steps in with their point of view.  She tells the students that the discussion starts Monday, she’ll monitor it, but won’t contribute until Thursday.  Then she can respond to themes that have been established (which is also a timesaver.)  Earlier, she can ask questions to promote discussion.
5. Allow learners to select topics. Not everything is interesting to every student.  Allowing students to choose which questions to respond to gives them some control.
6. Asking extension questions
7. Acknowledging contributions
8. Designated reader. Each learner takes on the role of the designated reader who does not contribute to the discussion (but can ask clarifying questions), but is responsible for summarizing the online discussion.
9. Rotating groups. You can also set up discussion forums with different issues to be discussed in each forum.  In groups of 4-5, students rotate to new forums each day.  Each group records their ideas about the issue, and students can then revisit the forums to see what other groups discussed.
10. Point systems. 0 points for idea that is not original or clear.  1 point for succinct, interesting, original argument or idea, and 2 points for a contribution that is creative and original, compelllingly argues a clear point, supported with evidence.  She has fellow students assign these points to each other, not anonymously.

Their slides are available on www.slideshare.net/plowenthal/

They also have an online handbook coming out from Lulu Press.  Not out yet, but it’s called the “CU Online Handbook” by the University of Colorado at Denver.  ID 7466014

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I’m blogging today from another conference — the Colorado Learning and Teaching with Technology (COLTT) conference. The keynote speaker is Richard Katz, the VP of Educause.

It’s an old story by now that digital technology has completely changed how we access media — nobody under 30 reads newspapers, and newspapers haven’t responded with a new business model to allow them to generate revenue from online sources.  The advent of Craig’s List is the canonical example of this — the newspapers lost their classifieds revenue by not taking Craig’s List seriously.  They thought their corner of the market was secure.  As Colbert said, “Knock knock.”  “Who’s there?”  “The death of newspapers.”

Is that fair?  Will we see the death of newspapers in our lifetime?  It seems likely. News reporting as an enterprise won’t die, of course, but newspapers as an institution (not just an industry) seem to be going the way of the dodo.

We also have more computing power and functionality than ever before.  Consider the iPhone — it’s breathtaking when juxtaposed with the mainframes of decades before.  And digital technology has certainly changed how science communicates.  Think about how scientists communicated in the age of Einstein.  Ideas were communicated via handwritten letter, sent through traditional post. Nowadays we can get 10 colleagues’ comments on a paper, within a day, with tracked changes.  This has been very liberating for the exchange of scientific ideas.  We can advance faster, perhaps, today, with the ease of communication.  (On the other hand, it takes so much time to keep up with all the communication, much of which is watered-down in content because it’s too darned easy, so does it come out in the wash?).

Katz’ bottom line:  technology is reducing the amount of busy-work in the scientific enterprise by making things easier.  I’m sure that’s true, though there are some new kinds of busy-work that it creates.  I know that my brain often feels fragmented, it’s harder to focus with the huge streams of information flow — listservs, blogs, emails, and papers. I believe (and I’ve seen some research to suggest it) that technology is changing the way my brain works (and not for the better) resulting in reduced attention span and all that.  Katz cautions that now there is so much information, too, that we’re exposed to a lot of disinformation.  We use truthiness to intuitively sift among all the different stories out there.  It’s impossible to apply logical analysis to the entire internet firehose, so we have to resort to heuristics to decide what to believe.  We also resort to the wisdom of the crowd to decide what to believe (eg., ratemyprofessor.com).

Katz also says that we’re workig harder now, as academics, than ever before.  Academics are burning out at high rates, and we’re becoming less civil as a result.

What about our students?  I’ve posted before on the impact of the digital age on our classrooms.  Students aren’t coming to class as much, he says, and so we need to use new media to its best effect to help promote this declining engagement. Why haven’t we figured out how to use digital technology to do decentralized education, he asks?  Even in the Open University, (an entirely online university) students aren’t showing up in the organized chat rooms.  This is something we need to figure out how to do well.

The take-home message isn’t too surprising — digital technology is always getting better, and it’s allowing us to do profoundly big things.  However, the scholarship enterprise needs to adapt to the new technology, and the modern university will likely change to reflect these new technologies.  Universities are likely to be less about “place,” and more situated in virtual environments.

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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.

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This session is about how some institutions have sustained change in their courses, and what are the central features of changes that stick:  Eugenia Etkina (Rutgers), Steven Pollock (CU Boulder), Charles Henderson (Western Michigan).

The NSF will provide money to create reforms, but individual institutions have to figure out how to make them stick.  How is this done?  Faculty, of course, are self-interested folks.  What’s in it for them if they use your reformed materials when they teach that course?

Faculty need help to:

• Use interactive lecture methods
• Use your curriculum
• Get appropriate professional development
• Change their exams to assess the new elements of student learning that are being emphasized in the course
• Work with PER faculty to generate departmental support.

Traditionally, we’ve trained faculty to do these sorts of things and hope that they stick, but at Rutgers instead they made a new staff line to promote and support these reforms.  These staff are taken from graduate students who don’t finish their degree, PhDs who don’t go into academia, or post-docs. These jobs are easier to create than faculty lines, but there is no set career advancement path for those poor slobs (like me!) who take those jobs.  They also work with pre-service teachers in a great program to teach them how to use interactive teaching methods — they then use these pre-service teachers to staff these refromed courses.

Steven Pollock talked about our work at Colorado, and pointed out that faculty involvement includes faculty ownership — faculty meet to design course goals, develop materials, and to personalize the materials that have been previously created.  We have a departmental culture that supports faculty learning about these transformations through working groups, brown bags, faculty meetings, and team teaching.  At Colorado, students also buy in to the process — the vast majority find clickers useful for their learning, for example.  So, he suggests, the critical features seem to be to have

• initiators and proponents of the change
• institutional support
• resources such as materials, staff and class space
• faculty buy-in, including team teaching and personalization of materials
• student buy-in
• departmental culture

Charles Henderson discussed the particular issues surrounding new faculty, focusing on a new study by Boice.  New faculty struggle to deal with the teaching load in their first year, and research suffers (contrary to their expectations), but they aren’t particularly sophisticated in being able to ask for help and support in their teaching.  Instead they focus on the practice and principles of lecture and the content that is being presented.  They predict that their schedules will get more balanced, though they have no specific strategies to change their work weeks, and even though teaching is sucking up all their time, they’re not getting very good student evaluations.  Around the third semester faculty start to present easier material and blame poor student preparation for their continued difficulty in teaching.  In the fourth semester they still have no ans to change their approach, and they resent how much teaching is cutting into their research productivity.

So, new faculty

Equate good teaching = good content

• Teach cautiously and defensively to avoid criticism
• Blame external factors for their failures
• Don’t know how to improve teaching beyond improving content and making tests easier

We need to do more than let faculty “sink or swim” in the complex realm of teaching.

He advocates

1. New faculty workshops (broad awareness of instructional strategies)
2. Co-teaching (deep learning about one strategy)

The new faculty workshop he discussed is the new astronomy and physics workshop put together by the APS.  This is a short one time intervention where faculty go to a 4-day workshop to learn about a variety of instructional strategies, and it’s made mostly of “telling” — ie., the faculty passively learn about these different strategies.  So it doesn’t seem like it should work very well, from what we know about professional development, but oddly, it does.  A lot of faculty have improved awareness, attitudes, and use of PER based materials after the workshop — even according to their departmental chairs!  This workshop serves as a gateway, motivating them to work on more productive teaching strategies, rather than embarking on the downward spiral that Boice described.  One faculty said that the workshop “provided an important seed.”  They’re getting interested in new techniques at the workshop and then doing more work on their own.

What about co-teaching? Henderson and Dancy have a great paper that I highly recommend about the value of co-teaching, and we at Colorado have also found this immensely valuable in promoting faculty change and sustaining reforms. Henderson described the evolution of one teacher who he worked with, who was initially skeptical of these new teaching methods, started to think that maybe some of these methods were OK, and was eventually very positive.  One thing that this co-teacher valued was that he wasn’t Henderson’s “apprentce”, it was a collegial relationship.  This strategy is effective because a lot of the complex decision-making involved in teaching practices are being modeled and discussed in an immersive way.  Might this be effective for graduate students, he suggests?

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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.

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