The Active Class

The title of this post is taken, as a sincere form of flattery, from the title of an excellent semi-recent article in the Journal of College Science Teaching (Connie Russell, November 2009, pp 84-86, subscription required).  That, almost verbatim, is the text of a student email to her.  There was no salutation and no signature.  I’ve gotten disappointingly unprofessional emails like this — often from high school students who have read my blog on a topic and want the answers to their homework on a similar topic, or help on a science fair project.  One student wrote to me, frantically demanding a resource that had been linked to a blog post on ferrofluid, but the link was broken.  It was so rude that, while I answered his query, I did indicate that this was not the proper way to ask assistance of a professional.

So, why talk about students’ seeming inability to communicate properly with their professors?  Because, argues Connie Russell in her article, this problem is indicative of the lack of college readiness in the current crop of students.  While this is not a new problem, the nature of the problem might be changing.  What has changed about students’ high-school preparation in the last ten years?   Well, the increase in state-mandated testing, for one.  Has “teaching to the test” reduced attention to college-readiness skills in high school? Some have suggested that creativity and critical thinking suffer under the march towards higher standardized test scores; that students may not be well-prepared for college by this shift in K12 methods.

This poor college preparation could mean a dearth of critical thinking and reasoning skills, but it can also just mean that students are ill-prepared to understand what is expected of them.  And it could also mean that the “digital natives” have not been equipped to apply technological tools appropriately to support their learning.  Today’s instructors did not grow up in a digital world, and so did not themselves receive instruction on how to appropriately use technology when they were students — how to properly write an email without text-speak, whether multitasking by surfing the web during class will affect their attention to course content, or how to use good internet research habits.  Well, actually that last one has become the purview of the school librarian, bless their souls, but it’s not clear who should be responsible for helping students learn how to best use many other technologies in education.

So, who should be responsible for helping the digital natives integrate technology into their education?  The faculty teaching introductory courses should, it seems.  Not only are these faculty responsible for introducing freshmen to their discipline, but they are introducing freshmen to the world of college.  One of the goals of college instruction should be that a student becomes an expert learner — that they learn how to learn — or how to be metacognitive in their approach to their education. Or, as Russell concludes:

If we want students to meet our expectations, we must give them instruction on what we expect.

That includes the use of technology, such as the internet, email, and clickers.  In fact, one of the most common failure of clicker users that I’ve seen is to fail to explain to students why they’re introducing this technology, and how they expect students to engage with it.   It’s also important, too, to make it clear — to yourself and your students — just what your learning goals are for the class.  And if you’re using technology, how it relates to those goals.  Technology isn’t used just to keep students awake, but to further your goals in class.  One possible resource of interest – Ten Top Tips for Teaching with New Media (Edutopia, free registration required).

So, while it’s easy to roll your eyes at such inept emails, it’s worth a moment to pause and consider:  Is this a symptom of a larger breach in the college-readiness of students and their use of technology?  If so, consider making your expectations of students explicit — and giving them a chance to become more expert learners.

Image from University of Salford on Wikimedia

Social Media and Course Cohesion

This semester I have a large class with online and offline sections. How to bring them together, so that the e-students would feel connected, not isolated online? Feeling out of the proverbial loop is one of the most oft-cited challenges for distance learners. Traditionally, a face-to-face classroom, “requires a disciplined commitment from the students to actually participate in the learning activities and reach out to others in the class,” observes Cory Stokes, director of the Technology Assisted Curriculum Center, in charge of testing for online courses. In an online course, the onus is on the student to be self-disciplined enough to engage in self-study, often without the benefit of a class community to drive engagement and interest.

Research shows that there is a correlation between social presence and student success. When students feel connected to a community of inquiry they are more enthusiastic, motivated, and they perform better. If that engagement, communication, and awareness happens continuously and in real-time, as it does in a face-to-face classroom — all the better.

So I decided to take my teaching to the one place where students naturally connect everyday, all day: social networks. First I socialized the learning management system (we use Moodle) by creating discussion boards for on-demand threaded conversations in a secure, gated community. Then I looked to Twitter and Facebook as more public and familiar places for members of my “bricks” and “clicks” course sections to sync.

Teaching on Facebook and Twitter isn’t going to be an option that makes sense for every instructor, but here is why it is working wonders to create a sense of social presence in my class:

P2P Effects. On the Facebook wall, students do peer-to-peer mentoring, troubleshooting, and Q&A at every hour of the day and night. I check into the course social channels several times a day, and yet often by the time I see the Facebook wall or Twitter hashtagged conversation, issues and solutions are already being shared without input from the prof. Not only is this a great example of generous community spirit and peer support, but it’s also self-directed learning on-demand. Since research shows that many students strongly prefer to learn from their peers, this is a good opportunity to enable positive peer effects. As a bonus, “students become partners in blended learning” to borrow an insight from a study at The University of Wolverhampton (<– link opens PDF).

Crowdsourced Curriculum. In the threaded discussions and on the wall, students post links to this week’s lecture topic — before and after the in-class lesson or online-webinar schedule. Put differently, my students scoop my lecture topics and Facebook them!  They scoop my case studies and newsworthy tie-ins and tweet them! Students are plugged into the news and they have high-traffic platforms on which to share the most intriguing stories. There’s nothing that delights me more than this crowdsourcing effect, as students work together to make the material relevant for each other (and thus easier to learn). “If Generation Y likes to do one thing, it’s to share cool, creative, funny and quirky things with their friends,” concluded a recent survey (<– link opens PDF) of millennials’ social media consumption habits by L2ThinkTank.

Network Effects. Sharing course information on Facebook and Twitter means that it is automatically distributed not just to registered students, but to students’ entire social graph. A course tweet is sent to all followers, a Facebook post to the course page is also on one’s personal Facebook profile. This distribution of status updates means that course-related conversations (online and presumably off) happen far beyond the webinar chat rooms and lecture halls. Unlike the formal learning management system, which keeps discussion posts behind a wall (what happens on Moodle stays on Moodle, so to speak), the network effects model of social media amplifies students voices across their personal networks. I’ve found this online word of mouth virtually guarantees that enthusiasm for the course (and enrollment)  remains high year after year. But more importantly, it allows students to demonstrate their membership in, and contributions to, a learning community—in a very public, and sometimes even positively viral way.

These three ideas are just the tip of the iceberg, as there are hundreds of ideas for teaching with Facebook. Of course, not all students use these social platforms. Having a course Facebook page instead of a course Facebook group enables non-Facebookers to read all posted content, and likewise, Twitter is also accessible without a site membership.

Although there is a lively debate ongoing about using popular social networking as teaching tools, my experience encourages me to agree with studies that show social networking enhances student performance and enriches learning experiences both inside the online or offline classrooms and elsewhere on campus.

There are many other tools and techniques beyond Facebook and Twitter for using social media to create social presence, including this roundup. However if your goal, like mine, is to meet students where they are, and leverage their familiarity with social communication for educational purposes, then Facebook,  Twitter, and YouTube are the obvious channels of choice.

One of the most difficult things to do when teaching is getting students to engage with each other about the material in meaningful ways that move the needle of their understanding or skill-set. Instructors of small classes and large classes alike face this challenge everyday. It’s not easy to craft activity lessons that succeed in keeping students focused, on-topic, while connecting in small groups or class-wide discussion. We know that active, engaged inquiry, conversations and debates are exactly what’s required for students to retain information and grasp concepts and theories. When it works, and students are buzzing about the lesson, teachers may stand back for a moment and think, YES!

So, how to get that buzz going? There are so many ways. Clickers are one strategy that has worked for me.

Oddly enough, clickers are at base a 1-way tech tool. Teacher posts poll, students click-in. There’s no automated two-way feedback loop. And for that reason some faculty have criticized my decision to adopt clickers, admonishing me for reducing student engagement to a remote-controlled-yes/no function. I usually invite such naysayers to sit in on one of my classes, to see that 1-way polling is not the end of the story. It’s what happens next that is really exciting.

The buzz! It’s the one thing other clickerprofs warned me about: as soon as you open a poll, and again when you display the results, students are going to start talking to each other about the question. Get ready for the buzz! Very good advice, and it proved true of course on my first day using student response systems with a class of 300. For a teacher who has struggled for years to get students talking, this instant response was very energizing, very fun.

There are many strategies to use with clickers designed to keep students talking-on-task with each other. For example:

The easiest method is the “turn to your neighbor” example, wherein with preliminary results collected but not yet displayed on the screen, profs ask students to check in with the person seated beside them, to compare answers and justifications. According to Eric Mazur, the “turn to your neighbor and see if you can convince one another of the correct choice” method is effective because it supports students to engage in active learning and questioning and shifts the focus from the professor “teaching” the material.

The think-pair-share method also works wonders with clickers, with voting results displayed or not, asking students to check in with each other about their responses, then re-polling always results in more on-task buzz. This method is effective because “through this exercise, students get a chance to work through the question, and defend their position,” to cite Brian Young from Penn State (“Teaching With Clickers: Think Pair Share“)

Asking prediction questions is another conversation-generating technique that has worked well for me. As Derek Bruff observes, prediction questions are effective “since they allow students to commit to their predictions and compare their predictions to those of their peers. Then discussion of the incorrect answer choices provides an opportunity to deal with misconceptions.” Prediction questions do double duty, as “students become more interested in a demonstration when they have first committed to a prediction via a clicker question,” to borrow an insight from University of California at Santa Barbara’s comprehensive list of clicker question types. (“12 Ways UCSB Professors Are Using Clickers“)

I also use clickers to help students prepare for the exam (<– link opens PDF), by running multiple choice question polls drawn from my exam question bank. Whether polls are a quiz on the homework or asking students to recall a lecture point, in my experience these types of questions inspire a lot of quiet contemplation as the results are collected, then great whoops and sighs as results are revealed. Using clickers to help students with exam prep has been shown to increase outcomes and student engagement (<–link opens Word doc).

Clickers, a one-way technology, also work to provide timely feedback and summative assessment, letting students know whether they are “getting” the material. As one student commented, “when the prof asks a clicker question in class and you don’t know what the heck he’s even talking about, it helps you figure out what you need to do, so you can do better on the test, instead of like not finding out until the day of the exam that you don’t get it.”

The bottom line is that this simple technology, though not a pedagogical panacea, can help teachers create an active and engaged learning experience. They may transmit a one-way signal, but skilled clicker profs can use these gadgets to inspire a peer-to-peer information flow and create a cohesive, connected classroom.

I’ve been working for the past several years to figure out the best ways to teach faculty about how to use clickers effectively; to engage students, ask questions that get students thinking, and to use peer discussion to help students work together to learn from the questions. It’s not always easy. Recent research has shown that a lot of faculty, at least in physics, get really fired up about using clickers (by hearing Eric Mazur speak, for example, or perhaps by attending a talk or workshop like what I give), but then they go home to try it, and it all falls apart. Motivating faculty to use new teaching techniques isn’t the issue, it seems. They want to try new teaching methods, and see the value of interactive questioning during lecture. But there are a lot of little things that go into making clickers work with your students — such as creating student buy-in by explaining why you’re using clickers, showing students that you value the discussion around the questions and modeling that discussion, and providing proper incentive for engaging in this activity.

So, I’ve been putting together faculty workshops (and K12 as well) to teach educators about effective use of the tool, and trying to figure out the best ways to do so such that faculty have a high chance of success in using clickers when they return to their institution and try it. I’ll be sharing the results of this work in a free webinar in October, specifically aimed at others who work with faculty and teach them about effective questioning and clickers. Consider joining us, to get some new ideas and to share your own.

Here’s the full announcement:

—-

Teaching Faculty about Effective Clicker Use

Time: Tuesday, October 4th, 1pm EST
Register at: http://iclicker.com/newsandevents/events/
Note: Want the recording? You’ll get a download link after the session if you register.

Geared specifically for those involved in faculty development and support (e.g., instructional technologists, faculty excellence programs, or other faculty professional developers), this webinar will cover best practices in helping faculty to use clickers to enhance their teaching. The webinar presenter has been creating faculty professional development materials around clicker use for years, and will share tips and techniques — many based on research — for helping faculty to see the potential power of this technology and learn to implement it effectively. Webinar components will include: (1) best practices in clicker use, (2) resources available for faculty learning to use clickers, (3) research-based techniques for faculty development around clickers, and (4) working with faculty resistance and alleviating frustration. HIghly recommended: Watch “Make Clickers Work for You” webinar recording at http://theactiveclass.com/speaking-events/ prior to this webinar, and/or the video “How to use clickers effectively” at http://STEMvideos.colorado.edu.

(missed it?  You can watch the recording:

Streaming recording link

Download recording link

Recently I watched a video of Mark Zuckerberg (see below) addressing educators at The New Schools Summit earlier this year. He was invited to discuss the context of his donation of 100 million dollars to public schools in Newark, New Jersey, and his plans for an educational startup.

After introducing Zuckerberg, the moderator turns to the audience to ask for questions that will guide the discussion. This is where the video gets VERY hard to watch. Because instead of asking questions, the group of business pros and educators alike stumble, mumble, and fumble. Can they think of a question? Not without considerable confusion. The moderator is insistent—going so far as to remind participants that questions must end with question marks. And yet, person after person steps to the mic and … rambles. The exasperated moderator hardly knows how to record their nonquestions on the whiteboard, and eventually gives up. Why did this happen? Because even for highly educated and accomplished people, formulating questions on the fly is difficult. It’s an enviable skill, and it can make or break a meeting or session.

How many professional conferences have you been to, when, during question period, an attendee raises their hand and starts to go on and on, meandering, lost in tangents, prompting the presenter to ask some version of, “Is there a question in there?” Awkward indeed. Why is this such a frequent occurrence? According to Warren Berger and other theorists, it’s because “the habit of asking questions is trained out of us by the educational system.” That may be true—but so is the fact that many teachers are deeply committed to inquiry based learning.

Active, discovery-based instruction is a challenge to design, but as many researchers have shown, the results are amazing, as students hone their analytic skill set. Lessons built around or including collaborative, creative questioning tend to infuse the classroom with energy and enthusiasm. Classes engage with the material when it’s clear their perspectives and positions are critical to the learning experience. Teaching students to ask good questions is a foundational skill, but it’s also strategic.

Glance at any recent human resources research about hiring and mentoring young people today and you’ll see the repeated insight that “millennials love sharing their ideas and want to know that they are being heard, if you invite them to give you constructive feedback, you can gain a different perspective and help them learn” (I’m quoting from Judy Lindenberger from The Evolved Employer blog).

I think of questions as the currency of academic work. Having a cache of great questions enriches research and teaching. Sometimes questions are more important than answers, so the truism goes. And it may seem obvious, but this is where clicker technology fits in nicely to solve a pedagogical challenge.

Using clickers encourages profs to think about their lessons in terms of a series of questions. Sounds simple, and the technology itself is simple, but creating great questions is anything but. Trying to integrate a few polls into a finished lecture after the fact is profoundly disruptive. I’ve connected with many instructors across the disciplines who say that building great polls into a lesson is a real challenge. The litmus test is student reaction, and it’s very obvious which questions are great and resonate, and which are facile and fall flat.

If questions matter, if asking great questions is an important skill, then it’s worth thinking about how-tos. Here’s a small roundup of tips for creating great questions, culled from around the web, to use as part of inquiry based learning design, with or without clickers:

1. Think of a series of questions instead of several one-offs. “Ask interpretative questions (eg., what does the author mean here?) before evaluative questions (eg. is the author right about this?). Let your earlier questions lay a foundation for your later ones.” (source — opens PDF) Put differently, “During class discussions, rather than beginning with a single question that is multilayered and complex, use a sequence of questions to build depth and complexity.” (source)

2. Integrate some current and/or newsworthy material to keep lectures fresh, and use that as the basis for opinion questions. “Using real-life scenarios, clinical examples, or case studies will reinforce the importance of the material your are presenting.” (source — opens PDF)

3. Ask predictive questions. Students are more likely to pay attention to the material if they’ve been asked to weigh in on it first. “Teachers ask recall questions far more than predictive questions. But predictive questions are more important to develop a sense of understanding. Good readers are unconsciously making predictions.” (source)

4. Pose generalizing and summarizing questions. Get a debate going in no time by suggesting a series of outcomes, and if you are polling, include options such as None of these options are correct, and/or I am undecided. “To get students thinking about effects, implications, extensions and inferences, ask students to weigh in on a series of likely and unlikely consequences.” (source)

More Resources

The book that helped me the most when getting started building my cache of clicker questions: Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments by Derek Bruff.This highly-readable book identifies types of questions and provides a host of teaching strategies and instructional goals which inspired me to develop my own polls.

I also teach online, and one of my favorite and affordable edTech tools to facilitate question-based learning is PollDaddy. I also use Survey Monkey, but find PollDaddy very intuitive and nicely designed.

Here is the Zuckerberg video I mentioned at the outset:

Assessment is a stressful subject — for teachers and students alike.  How do you get through grading all those tests?  How do you know if your test really measured your students’ learning?  How do you know if they got it?

I recently attended a talk by Andy Rundquist of Hamline University where he introduced the audience to the idea of standards-based assessment — and showed us how he’s using some innovative technology to measure his students’ achievement of those standards.  In standards-based assessment, you don’t just take the students’ overall average on several tests and midterms to get their final grade — rather, you test to see if they’ve achieved mastery of some of the core concepts that you have set as the “standards” of the course.  Typically those standards take the form of a learning goal or learning objective.  Can they derive the centripetal force on a planet rotating around the sun?  Can they write a computer program to add together simple numbers?  Etc.

But the trick is that, now, how do you know if a student has achieved mastery of that standard?  A typical paper test doesn’t seem as useful anymore.  That tests whether they can fill out the test, but not necessarily true mastery.  Hence, I think that Andy’s technological fix can be potentially useful to many of us instructors.

What he did was to use pencasts and screencasts to see whether students had achieved mastery of the goal.  This way, he could watch the student, and hear their thinking, and get a very complete picture of just how well they grasped the material.  Think of it as an oral exam, but one that the teacher can conduct from the comfort of their own home, and one that causes the student a bit less stress (and allows him/her to think about, and correct, their mistakes more easily).

Pencasts

These were done using the Livescribe pen and software.  The Livescribe pen records audio as it keeps track of where the pen is and what it’s doing.  The result?  A play-by-play audio recording with accompanying digital transcription of the student work.  We use these in research, to watch student thinking, and we use them in notetaking so that we have complete audio to go along with our rough notes.  But I’d never thought of using them as an assessment tool.  Andy pointed out that he can jump around to the “tricky bits” of a problem as he watches, so he can see whether they properly explain what they do at that point.  He can see the entire worked problem, too, so can see at a glance if it’s correct — but what he’s really listening for is whether they can explain why they did what they did.  I love it.

Screencasts

A screencast is just what you’d think — you can watch the student’s screen as they talk.  This is most important if you’re assessing them on something that’s not written, such as a computer program.  He used Jing, but there are a variety of tools out there.  Just like the pencasts, he was listening for student reasoning and thinking.

Of course, if you have a large lecture, this is harder to do.  He conjectures that you might be able to have students engage in peer assessment — in fact, during the oral exams that accompanied this approach, he had the class discuss the merits and shortfalls of each student’s work, coming to a consensus on what grade the student deserved.  He managed to frame this as a communal, not competitive, activity.  So, with the right framing and clear rubrics, this could work — and could really benefit students too!

Homework is a key learning opportunity for students — it’s where they spend most of their time on your course out of class, and it’s typically the only place where they spend time on their own, puzzling out the ideas presented in lecture.

So, how do you create homework that helps bring students to a deeper understanding of the material, targeting their specific needs?

Some techniques are pedagogical — such as Just in Time Teaching, where you frequently quiz students on their understanding of the topics, adjusting your instruction and gaining deep insight into their common difficulties.  This can help you properly target the homework to the class.

But some solutions could be technological.  I’ve been really excited about ALEKS (Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces) since one of our chemistry instructors enthusiastically told me how much she likes it.  ALEKS provides individualized learning through “adaptive questioning” — or, questions that change as you go along.  If you’ve taken the computerized GRE, you know what this is like — if the questions start getting really easy, you know you’re in trouble, because that means it’s trying to adapt the questions to your level.

But unlike the GRE, ALEKS isn’t trying to assess student understanding to assign a grade or a score — rather, ALEKS offers targeted instruction to the student on the topics that he/she is ready for.  For those learning theorists among you, those would be the topics in that student’s zone of proximal development. And what’s most interesting is that it doesn’t use multiple choice very much — it uses open-ended tools, such as input into graphs.  The teacher gets a report indicating the students’ aptitude in a variety of topics.

Here is a very nice outline of ALEKS, complete with screenshots.

ALEKS can help both with placement and with learning — in learning mode, the student gets practice problems and explanations.  Once the student has demonstrated mastery of the topic, then ALEKS moves on to new material.  It seems that this would be very appropriate to use with the standards based grading that I wrote about in my last post.

Ways I’ve seen ALEKS used:

• By institutions, to place students in the appropriate course
• By homeschoolers, as an instructional tool
• By students, as a tutor
• By instructors, for homework and formative assessment

They have a variety of course offerings, many in K12, but in higher ed they have many different products in math (e.g., pre-algebra, trigonometry, and various prep courses), business, statistics for the behavioral sciences, and science (mainly chemistry, plus math prep for college physics).  It’s not free — last I saw it cost $20 per student per month, though there are some bulk discounts.  Though, as ALEKS points out, it’s cheaper than a human tutor, and does provide individualized feedback.  I’m particularly  happy to see that it’s research based, though I admit I’m not familiar with the theory that supports it, and I don’t see information on whether it’s research tested (i.e., does it do what it purports to do) rather than just based on reasonable theory — though this article suggests that they are doing good work in that regard.

For those of you needing a free solution — there is Diagnoser, which isn’t quite the same, but offers research-based testing to help teachers determine their students difficulties and misconceptions and offer suggestions on addressing those difficulties in class.

Image by Mosborne01 on Wikimedia Commons.

A few years ago, my son chose for his Halloween costume a pair of jeans, a white t-shirt, black leather jacket and a white mask with no features. I asked him what he was supposed to be and he shrugged his shoulders; he didn’t really know. I told him that as soon as he got to school, someone was going to ask him what he was dressed up as. It was inevitable. And so knowing that, shouldn’t he practice his response to the question he knew was coming?  If he practiced it, he would know it and would be prepared to answer the question.

Similarly, my husband Jay, who teaches biology, advises his students to practice writing short answer essays when they are studying for one of his exams. Students know that those questions will be on the test, so why would they not practice and try to write one prior to the exam? The idea is that you should practice what you know you will need to do, and it will help you learn. Surely, if you know something is going to be asked, shouldn’t you be prepared to answer it in the same way?

A recent research article showcased in The New York Times points to the effectiveness of taking practice tests in order to study.  Most students study in a very passive way—they highlight their books, or read over class notes. The research suggests that passive studying techniques may be less effective than actually practicing what you will ultimately need to do to show you have learned something. And that is to retrieve the information.

In the study published in the journal Science, researchers found that practicing retrieval led to greater learning gains than did studying with concept mapping. The authors propose that “a retrieval event may actually represent a more powerful learning activity than an encoding event” (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011, p. 1).

Concept mapping is often used by teachers to help students make connections between facts, and is considered to be a very active learning task. Students may be asked to use all of the information they have learned about genetics to create a map showing the major concepts and the connections between them. This activity is thought to be an effective studying tool. The recent work by Karpicke & Blunt (2011), however, suggests otherwise.

Even though self-testing has been shown to have tremendous value, many students ignore it when they are preparing for exams. When Henry Roediger of Washington University asked students how they study he found that “they think they know it because they have read it so many times, but they haven’t practiced the skill they’ll need on the test, and that is retrieval.” Roediger & Karpicke (2006) found that testing students immediately after they had studied a passage promoted much better long-term retention than if a student simply studied the passage over and over. And yet it was the students who repeatedly studied who had more confidence in their ability to recall details later.

Not only is self-testing and retrieval shown to be beneficial for learning, so is the practice of retrieval even when you think you already know something. If you study the capitals of the countries of the world and you think that you have mastered the fact that the capital of Turkey is Ankara, should you ditch that card? No, you should leave it in your stack and keep practicing retrieval. To have really good long-term learning you need to keep coming back and retrieving information, even if you think you know it.

The idea that self-testing drives learning is key to the efficacy of Prep-U, an online quizzing tool where students can take practice quizzes relating to their course content. Prep-U is an adaptive system and provides students with questions at exactly the right difficulty level for them. Students answer questions one at a time and must submit their responses before seeing the next question. In this way, students have to really think about the question and to commit to an answer before moving. Moreover, even if a student answers a question correctly one time, they may still see the same question, or a similar question, again in a later quiz. In this way, students keep practicing and retrieving information, and learning is supported. The effects of self-testing are also thought to be enhanced by feedback on whether or not answers are correct. Prep-U delivers this feedback, thus providing students with the opportunity to re-study areas of weakness and come back and take another quiz.

Used as an augmentation for any course, Prep-U can harness the power of using testing for learning, and it can encourage students to study in the most efficient and beneficial way for maximizing long-term learning.

Karpicke, J.D., & Blunt, J.R. (2011). Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science, 772, 772-5.

Roediger, H.L., & Karpicke, J.D. (2006) Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17, 249-255.

Simulation of a lser

Computer simulations are a fantastic tool in education — especially in science. They can show us the models that we have our heads, like how atoms pack themselves into a molecule, or let us travel to the moon to see how gravity works.  They can give us insight into the invisible, or let us see exactly what’s supposed to be happening if the world were really a frictionless vacuum.  Some great simulation tools are the PhET interactive simulations, or the Physlet applets. But we too often tend to show students the “right” model, the “right” way of doing the problem, or try to show them the “correct” way of thinking about it.  But, think about it, does a wine expert learn what the taste of “oak” is in a Cabernet only by tasting the very best examplar of “oak”?  No, he tastes a wide variety of wines, to learn to distinguish flavors of “oak” from flavors of fruit or smoke.  This idea of using “contrasting cases” to help students learn to discern and differentiate different features of a problem has been used in a variety of educational settings, from teachers’ understanding of educational psychology, to interactive lecture demonstrations. If you’re not familiar with this idea, or its twin “A Time for Telling”, take the time to at least skim the seminal article by Schwartz and Bransford in Cognition and Instruction:  A Time for Telling. This article changed the way that I think about teaching and lecture.

But, how does this relate to simulations?  Most simulations tend to do the best they can to depict and accurate vision of how the world really works.  And that’s fine, that’s what the design goal tends to be.   However, we also want to teach students to be critical consumers of information — yet they tend to blindly trust simulations.  So, I was very pleased to see a recent article in The Physics Teacher by Anne Cox et al, where they took the instructional idea of asking students to identify”What, if Anything, is Wrong?” and applied it to instructional simulations.  The “What, if Anything, is Wrong?” technique is a wonderfully simple and powerful tool from the TIPER project — check out their website for a variety of other little gems, such as ranking tasks, working backwards tasks, and predict and explain.

The authors of this study not only had students identify the error in the simulation, but provided the code for them to fix it; thus building in computational skill into the classroom practice as well.  For example, we know that students tend to do poorly on questions regarding the electric force on a charged object due to another charged object.   The authors created a simulation where students can add and move charges around, visualizing the force vectors on the object.  However, if they happen to change the charges so that the charges are not equal, they will find that they will no longer push on each other with equal and opposite force (as required by Newton’s Third Law).  So, not only must they identify this error, but also find out what in the simulation is causing it.

Regardless of whether your aim is for students to be able to do computational physics, the brilliance of this task is that students go in knowing that they’re looking for an error — and if that error is one that students often make themselves, then finding it is both challenging and illuminating, and MUCH more powerful than just telling students what is the proper way to think about that concept.  Now, it’s cemented for them.  The authors’ “What is Wrong?” package for electric fields is available on Open Source Physics.

For those who don’t happen to have the time or resources to create intentionally incorrect simulations, you can still use this same method with pencil-and-paper tasks, such as the TIPER “What, if Anything, is Wrong” tasks, or “Find the Flaw” problems.  Daniel Styer write about Find the Flaw problems in the same recent issue of The Physics Teacher.  He has a very nice method for giving these problems.  He presents the problem to the students, and tells them that four friends have worked the problem and produced four different answers.  He asks students to provide simple reasons showing that three of these candidate answers must be incorrect.  So, this is basically a multiple choice problem, with the focus on the incorrect answers, rather than the correct answer.  He provides some examples here. I can imagine using this method with clicker questions and peer instruction — ask the clicker question, but instead of telling students to “find the correct answer” by discussing with their peers, have them determine why the incorrect answers are wrong.  This gives students valuable practice in checking their own work — how do they know if their own answer is right or wrong? They should be able to check the values, units, dimensions (or whatever is important in your discipline).  And, says Styer, students like them:  find-the-flaw problems “appeal to their sense of adventure and of Sherlock Holmes-style sleuthing.”  He finds that students are not a bit better at checking their own work, certainly better than when just asking students vaguely to “discuss your result.”  What a boring question.

And, of course, this can easily apply to watching films in class.  Finding the flaw in films is an old mainstay of science instruction — see, for example, Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics or Bad Astronomy’s Bad Movies or some more geology focused Good and Bad Sci-fi movies.    Showing students clips from movies and asking them to identify the incorrect science is fun and valuable.

In just a few weeks I’m heading to Houston Texas for a teaching strategy refresh weekend at the #Clickers2011 meeting June 3-4. If you’re anywhere in the vicinity and/or can spare the time to be there, the line-up of speakers looks fantastic, and it would be great to connect. If you think it’s time for a tech tool refresh to put more interactivity into your course, come meet with us—100 technoprofs brainstorming connected teaching methods is a hugely valuable opportunity—don’t miss it!

Derek Bruff is headlining, as he should be, considering he wrote the book (literally!) on Teaching with Classroom Response Systems. Derek is a walking storehouse of tips, tricks and best pedagogical practices for getting the most out of clickers across the disciplines. If you have a clicker question, no matter what brand of device or type of course you’re working with—send it to @DerekBruff and he’ll be sure to have a response or resource. I’ve sent several new clickerprofs to Derek for advice and he’s always been super helpful.

I’m sitting on a panel called “Beyond the Status Quo: Encouraging Innovation in the Classroom to Meet Today’s Challenges” with Derek and some other edTech friends including Scott Jaschik who is Editor of Inside Higher Ed, Jim Julius of San Diego State University, and Doug Duncan from UC-Boulder. The full lineup of papers is here.

As you can imagine, the group with be a fairly mobile- and socially- connected bunch, so there is sure to be many valuable tidbits on the live tweetstream at #Clickers2011. For all the micro-highlights, meeting updates, and related clicker resources, follow us at @iclickerclique.