There is so much I wish I remember from my early college years.  I have books sitting on my shelves from classes I took, but if you asked me what I learned in those classes, I would be at a loss for words.  Although I studied a lot in college and got good grades, I don’t think I was very “smart” in terms of the study strategies I employed, and I think many of the courses demanded that I memorize lots of facts and ideas rather than really understand them and be able to apply them.  How I wish I was paying more attention then and making that information more meaningful!  I envy those who can easily rattle off information they learned long ago and retain that information; this has always been challenging for me.

According to a new report published in USA Today, I might not be alone.  The report claims that:

“Nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges don’t make academics a priority.”

This is a pretty strong statement!  It’s evidently based on “transcripts and surveys of more than 3,000 full-time traditional-age students on 29 campuses nationwide, along with their results on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test that gauges students’ critical thinking, analytic reasoning and writing skills.”

I’d like to know more about this sample and the methods used to gather data.  I’m especially interested in learning more because ANOTHER media report of the same study indicates that the sample was composed of “more than 2,300 students” from 24 schools.  Why the discrepancies?

http://www.startribune.com/nation/114121054.html

I tried a new assignment this semester in my introductory statistics course.  Students had the opportunity to choose from among several options in order to receive credit, and they could also elect to create their own assignment and pursue that assignment (with instructor approval).  One option was to join a special Facebook group I had set up and to write about and share up to 10 links to media reports that made use of statistics.  Another option was to find a journal article to critique that employed at least one of the analysis techniques students learned about in class.  Yet another option was to create a YouTube video in order to showcase something that was learned in class.

In the end, a little over half of the students in my two introductory sections chose to use Facebook, and they found lots of exciting news articles to share and discuss.  Most other students elected to critique an article, but I did end up with five students who created YouTube videos, one student who shared a lesson she wrote about how to teach probability to a group of younger students, and another student who shared a journal she kept during the semester about her thoughts on the topics we studied and some of the challenges she faced in learning these topics. I also had a student who used Twitter instead of Facebook to share thoughts on different media reports.

Overall, I’m really happy with how this “experiment” worked out.  I liked that I could give students choices in terms of demonstrating what they learned in the course, and I hope, in the end, that the students found this to be a useful exercise.  I created a special anonymous end-of-semester survey in order to find out more from the students about why they made certain choices and what they feel they learned in the process.  I’m still gathering responses, but I look forward to hearing what they say.

I will definitely do this again, but I think I might change a few things.  I would love it if more students created videos, but I’m not sure how to best encourage that or provide support for students who might need more help with technology.  Perhaps giving students the option of collaborating on a video with a peer would help.  I also found it to be very challenging to keep up with all that was posted on Facebook, and I wish I could have responded to every one of the posts and shared more of my own examples as well.  I also wish the students had taken more time to respond to each others’ posts, but that was not a requirement of the assignment.  Maybe it should be.  Hopefully, even if they were not responding, they were reading what their peers wrote, and it led them to seek out more information about some of the articles that were shared.  A handful of students even posted more than the required 10 posts, and this was great to see.

Although I won’t teach the introductory course again until the summer, I’ll keep the Facebook group going and post my own things here and there.  Who knows.  Maybe some of the students who are now members will return to that group now and again to see what is going on.  That would be neat. 

A recent article in The New York Times by David Brooks summarizes several interesting behavioral science studies.  I’d like to hunt down a few of these to bring to class!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/opinion/07brooks.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a212

Lately, I’ve gotten a bit behind in sharing interesting studies I have been finding online.  I have several unopened e-mail messages from different listservs I belong to or publications I subscribe to, and I’m sure there are lots of great things I could be blogging about.  Plus, my students have been sharing lots of interesting articles on our class Facebook page.  Hopefully, I can find the time to catch up once final exams are over and done with. 

When I first started teaching, one of my biggest fears is that I wouldn’t know the answers to questions my students might ask.  My image of the teacher was someone who always had the answers, primarily because I had never been in a class (at least not that I could remember) where a teacher didn’t seem to have an answer to a student’s question.  I worried a lot about losing credibility with my students if I couldn’t readily answer their questions.

I soon learned that students were rather forgiving in cases where I didn’t know the answers, and there have certainly been many of those cases over the years.  I know now that it’s okay to say “You know, I’m not quite sure of that.  Let me think more about this and do some research and then we’ll talk about this during our next class session.”  I don’t say this terribly often, but it’s comforting to know I CAN say it, and my students will still–hopefully–respect me and trust in my understanding of the material.

What I tend to struggle more with is not being able to think as quickly on my feet as I would like to.  I am so envious of those instructors who might get a question they are totally unprepared for but who can easily “think on the spot” and share a very sensible and comprehensible answer.  This has always been a challenge for me.  Last night, for instance, a question came up that I was not quite prepared for, and I didn’t feel I could formulate a quick response that I thought students would understand.  As I think more about it, it’s rather silly that I couldn’t respond more quickly since it’s a question I SHOULD have been prepared for.  I asked my class to work through some review problems related to correlation and regression, and one problem presented them with a very small data set and asked them to think–without doing any calculations–about how the two variables in question would be related.  If you took the data and graphed it, a perfect box shape would be formed, and the regression line would end up being perfectly horizontal.   In response to this, one student asked why the regression line can never be perfectly vertical.  Good question!  I’m glad she asked this, but I found myself stumbling to try to explain it right on the spot, especially in a way that I though would make the most sense to the class and would be easy for them to understand. 

This again was one of those questions I told everyone we would come back to next week, after I had a little more time to think about the best way to approach it.  This question was asked very early during our class period, and, of course, I kept thinking about it all evening, and finally, toward the end of class, I thought I had a way to explain it that would make sense.  Since we only had a few minutes left, however, and since we’d moved on to a new topic that we weren’t completely finished talking about, I thought it would be better to wait and talk more about this during our next class session.

I wonder sometimes if even the experts who have been teaching for 20 or 30 years find themselves in positions where they can’t easily answer questions on the spot.  I do like that these questions come up since they lead me to grow and expand my own understanding of concepts and ideas (and result in better preparation the next time I teach that same topic).  I only hope that NOT having those immediate answers isn’t a detriment to student learning. 

Does it ever get easier to “think on the spot”?

I have learned some lessons the hard way this semester about backing up my work.  I’m not sure why, but I’ve had more problems with technology this semester than I can ever remember.  Twice I thought I had lost one of my flash drives, and each time I found it, I vowed to back up those files so I wouldn’t be left high and dry in the event I really did lose it.  Of course, I never did get around to backing it up. Why?  I have no good excuse. It was one of those things that I meant to get to, eventually, but just never did. 

Then, one day, I inadvertently removed that same flash drive from my computer while a particular file was open, and it corrupted the flash drive.  Not all was lost, but most of the files for one of my classes were completely erased, along with a few other files in random folders.  I had a small pity party about this, but then I remembered I did have back-up copies of many of those files (albeit from about three years ago), and there were many other more current files I could download from my course websites and easily update.

I was naturally upset about this because I felt so much hard work had just disappeared, and I didn’t like the thought of spending so much time trying to re-create that work when I had so many other things I needed to be doing.  It seemed so wasteful to me.  But, I started to think that maybe it all happened for a reason, and that it was a sign that I needed to re-think what I was doing in my classes and begin anew.   I wanted to stay upbeat because, in the scheme of things, what I lost was replaceable, and I could have lost so much more.  This was, after all, just one set of files from one of the three courses I normally teach. 

I lost a bunch of other files yesterday–from a different flash drive where I kept the files for my intermediate statistics course.  This time, I was in the midst of working on a handout for my class when suddenly, my computer just shut down and re-started.  This is not the first time I have had this problem with this particular computer.   I assumed once it was up and running again, I would be able to open the file I had been working on (one that I had saved several times along the way) and just resume my work.  When I attempted to do this, I found the entire flash drive had gotten corrupted.  Everything was gone!  Why was this happening again???

I was upset for awhile, and I cried.  Chad tried to help me retrieve this work, but nothing we did made a difference.  This too was a class I had backed-up about three years ago.  Of course, this is also a class that I’m always changing, so my older files will need quite a bit of revision as I head into the spring semester.   I have a lot I can download from my course websites, and I will probably be able to re-create much of what was lost, but it will be a lot of work, and this isn’t what I was hoping to be doing over winter break.  But, just as before, I wonder if this is a sign to go in a new direction.  Perhaps it’s only when we lose it all that we can truly let go and grow. 

I am now resolved to back-up my work every chance I get, and I mean it this time!

It’s Friday, and typically, that means I’m trying to catch up with the discussions going on in my online classes.

I generally wait until later in the week to jump into discussions because I want to give students time to post their thoughts and begin responding to each other.  I think it’s better–in the long run–if the students can try to help each other and answer each others’ questions before I chime in.  When I do eventually post, I usually try to clarify things that are said, or highlight important things that I notice, or ask questions in an effort to encourage students to “dig deeper” and re-think some of those concepts and ideas that are still obviously very fuzzy in their minds. 

My introductory students are talking this week about hypothesis tests and I asked them to each come up with a unique research question that would involve conducting a one-sample t-test.  They need to share this question with their peers and talk about what the null and alternative hypotheses would be, what assumptions they’d need to verify (and why), what it would mean if they made a Type 1 or a Type 2 error (and which error would be more serious), how they would determine if the results of their analysis were “statistically significant,” and how they might be able to use a confidence interval to test their hypothesis.  Students in my intermediate statistics class are now learning about the two-way between-subjects ANOVA, and they are talking about and critiquing a journal article about a study that sought to examine whether the size of a popcorn container and the freshness of the popcorn within that container interact to affect popcorn consumption.

There are very interesting discussions going on right now, and I love that, but as I logged on this morning to begin reading through the discussions, I found myself skimming through things a bit more than I would like.  Across the two classes, there were over 100 messages to read through, and so many of the messages were rather lengthy.  It’s hard to keep up with it all! This is a good thing, but I worry I’m getting lazy in terms of responding to messages, and that I might be missing things that I should be reacting to, and that I’m not being as efficient and as effective as I could be.  However, were I to change something, I’m not sure what I would want to change.  I like that my students engage in these discussions, and I like that I can interact with them as they wrestle with new and sometimes confusing ideas.  I think I just feel I could be doing more and I should be able to do more, but time and energy always hold me back.

Last year, I got a very interesting e-mail from one of my online students.  He e-mailed me because he was worried that he was doing something wrong.  He felt this way because he noticed that whenever there was a discussion assignment and I posted messages within his group discussion room, I never posted a message in response to anything he wrote.  I certainly wasn’t ignoring him on purpose, and if he had been way off on the wrong track, I definitely would have tried to steer him in the right direction.  It got me thinking, however, about how I have this opportunity during discussion assignments to interact with each and every one of my students–an opportunity I don’t have in a regular classroom–and I don’t want to let that opportunity slip away.  Now, I feel almost compelled to say something in response to each student’s initial posting during every small group discussion activity, and I think that’s why I am now getting a little overwhelmed.  My online classes aren’t too big–one has 33 students and the other has 28–but it’s still a lot of reading and writing, and that can take a toll.  It’s worth it, but is there a better way to stay on top of it all and be smart about it??

I found myself thinking this morning about what life might be like if I had only ONE course to teach, and if that was my full time job (i.e., just preparing my course materials and teaching that ONE course, without having to worry about meetings or committee work or other obligations).  Now, my time and attention is divided among so many things, and it always seems like something gets shortchanged in the end.  This frustrates me, but what can I do?  Oh, yes…learn to say “no” more.  I’m still working on that one. 

I’m very worried about myself right now because I have an extremely bad attitude, and I need to snap out of this because I have way too much to do.  Unfortunately, having so much to do is one big reason I have this bad attitude, so it’s almost like a Catch 22.  I took on more than I should have this semester and it’s catching up with me in big ways.  We’re also now heading into those last few weeks of the semester, and it seems like I always get down around this time.  I start losing patience, and I begin to feel overwhelmed with all that needs to get done in such a short amount of time.  Yes, I’m feeling sorry for myself today and complaining, but that’s part of the reason I have this blog.  I need an outlet and a way to reflect on life and sort things out.  I’m hoping writing about how I feel will help me feel better.

I know I’m just in a temporary funk.  This happens to me almost every semester, and I know the way I’m feeling is not uncommon.  All around me, I see colleagues and students who are totally stressed out.  I’m not sure what is going on right now, but it seems like we’re all more busy than ever, and it takes a toll after awhile.  You can almost feel the tension in the air.  There are certain days when I find myself feeling so excited and exhilarated by all that is going on and all the opportunities I have, but there are other days–like today–when I want to burst into tears and crawl into bed and just pull the covers over my head.  Not only is a very hectic semester winding down, but the weather is getting colder, and this is a sign that winter is right around the corner.  I don’t like winter.

One way or another, I’ll get through the next couple of months, even though I’ve given up hope that the “lull” I was hoping for in the semester will ever get here.  But, maybe this is a good thing.  At least it keeps me off the streets. 

I started this semester feeling so very excited about a new project I am working on, but now I just feel confused and frustrated.  I’m hoping this will pass.

There was a time when my primary role–and job responsibility–involved teaching.  I would teach my classes, and I would create assessments that I felt allowed me to determine if my students were obtaining particular learning objectives.  In many ways, I think I was very naive then, because I didn’t fully appreciate all that went into creating good assessments, and I didn’t give the construction of my assessments the kind of attention it really deserved.

Now that I have gotten more involved in the Statistics Education community and in research related to teaching and learning statistics, I realize there is so much involved in determining whether students are learning what we want them to learn, and there is so much we need to think about when it comes to creating an environment conducive to learning.  I realize there is so much more that I personally need to learn and so much I just don’t understand yet, and this is becoming very apparent to me as I’m trying to figure out how to go about implementing and evaluating a new approach to teaching.  I wish this wasn’t such a stumbling block for me, and I don’t know why it is.  I want to create a classroom environment where students have some choices when it comes to the software packages they will use in the course, and I want those choices to be supported by instruction.  I want to investigate what kind of an impact this will have on what goes on inside and outside the classroom.  How might it affect how students interact with each other during classroom activities?  How will it impact what the instructor does?  How might the course need to be restructured in order to make an approach like this successful?  How will we know if it is successful?  Will it be more or less challenging to implement an approach like this in an online environment as opposed to a face-to-face environment?

I’m excited about this project because I feel it will have important implications for how students learn to use statistical software and how we can teach them how to use software, but I’m having a hard time figuring out just how to evaluate what I want to do, and what kind of data I will need to gather.  I feel it shouldn’t be this hard, but it is. 

I obviously still have a lot to learn.

We’re just now beginning Week 3 of fall semester, and so far, 14 of my students are now signed up for my Facebook group.  Several of them have posted interesting news stories they are finding that relate to statistics.  I love it!

One of my students shared an interesting study about milk and weight loss.  Just recently, I posted a link to a study about how drinking water before meals is supposed to help curb your appetite (I still need to try that).  Another study claims that drinking two glasses of milk a day will help you lose weight.  I only wish I was a bigger milk fan.

http://www.nhs.uk/news/2010/09September/Pages/milk-dairy-weight-loss.aspx

Another one of my students shared an article that reports the results of two studies I’d like to learn more about.  One of the studies is about how romantic relationships can lead to the loss of two close friends from your inner circle, and the other examines how men and women maintain friendships on Facebook.  Apparently, “women’s Facebook friends were more often friends from everyday life that they spent time with, while men tended to collect as many friends as they could, even if they hardly knew them.”  I’m intrigued by this and anxious to find the original study to determine how the researchers actually examined the types of friends women and men have on Facebook.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/sep/15/price-love-close-friends-relationship