personal contact in a large lecture class

It is a challenge to have more contact with students when there are approximately 500 young people taking the class.

One small thing that I do is after the 2nd exam. Exams are stressful moments in a course. Before the exams I organize review sessions etc., but after the exam I look at how each student did in the 2nd exam compared to the first exam. I contact each student (via email) who noticeably did much better in the 2nd exam compared to the first and congratulate them. I also contact students who scored noticeably worse on the 2nd exam and offer to meet to plan how they/we can help.

Students reply to me after these emails, generally appreciative, and I have now approximately a dozen one-on-one meetings scheduled.

The core idea is that if I was teaching a class of 20 students, I would be able to walk up and congratulate the students who improved, or quietly talk to those who did not do so well. In a class size of 500, it is harder to achieve this level of personal contact, but it is still possible, and it is still important or perhaps more so.

mid-semester modeling projects

The projects are a highlight of the course for me and from anecdotal conversations, also for many of the students. The stated goal is for students to increase their analysis skills by taking some device they encounter regularly and model its behavior. To do this you have to analyze the science that underpins how the device works, figure out what level of detail is vital to calculate the performance, and what can be safely ignored.

The projects this year ranged from calculating how far you needed to place apart tornado sirens, to how heating depended on location in a microwave, to the time it takes to cook a pizza in an oven that cooks on both sides. For the latter project, the students made contact with engineers in the company which, last I heard, might lead to an internship.

I think part of the success of the projects is that it gives students choice, it provides room for creativity, and it is a welcome break from much of the standard work students do in the first few years at university.

Big picture: these projects help develop analysis skills that are key goals for higher education.

I plan to put together a student satisfaction survey of these projects, with perhaps some emphasis on what parts of the experience did they find most beneficial. This might lead to a publication to help disseminate the idea, but where? Self-reports may not be as good as some pre-post comparison of student analysis skills. But that study is not feasible at this point

students do well on complex problems :)

This week we had our first group exam where the students work in groups of 2-3 students to solve a multi-faceted problem. The problems include more than one idea that can only be solved by the students brainstorming, analyzing the problem and building a solution. The students cannot use plug-n-chug strategies.

Progress has been great. At the start of the semester, students complained loudly that these problems were too hard and that they had no idea where to start. During the exams I walked around and students were debating, arguing, revising, exclaiming and struggling with the problems.

We graded their work using a rubric that emphasized the processes the students used. The average score was 80% which is just great. But the real key will be whether students are starting to think about problem-solving as more than just finding the right equation to use. I will be able to assess this via the end of semester problem-solving reflection paragraph that students write.

In the end my goal is to help students strive towards these higher goals. They will need these more productive approaches to the complex challenges they will face in their careers

reducing plagiarism

In the mid-semester projects the students show amazing creativity. Especially in deriving and building their physics models and explanations. However we have noticed over the years that some groups cut and paste from the internet whole paragraphs (or more) for the introduction, i.e. the section that describes the device.

I have described the down-side of this type of plagiarism in lecture. Mainly the argument that in their future careers writing a report/developing a project that builds on an existing idea is an efficient and good thing to do, but the source of the idea should be acknowledged, and doing so does not harm your case/project/pitch/report. However presenting an idea as your own when it is not leads to a negative impression of you.

There are other arguments why students should not plagiarize, but I've found that this practical argument of "use the good ideas that you find, acknowledge them, then extend the ideas" resonates with the students.

This semester we are also trying a new tool that searches the web for plagiarized text. The tool is safeAssign and it is a new part of webCT. The students usbmit their draft project to safeAssign then the students and TAs see a report which contains an estimate of the amount of plagiarized text, as well as a color-coded highlight to which internet sources the text seems to have been cut-and-paste from.

So far the tool has worked with reports ranging from 0% plagiarism to over 90% plagiarized :( Since the students see the reports, the goal is for them to redo these sections before they submit their final project.

quantitative modeling/calibrated peer review

A key part of the course is for students to grow in their ability to solve complex problems. One vital skill is to take a complex system and to develop an approximate, model description of it that captures the main features, but is simple enough to be tractable.

In the mid-semester projects students must come up with a reasonable model description of an device they regularly encounter and try to quantitatively calculate some aspect of it, e.g. how long it takes for a pizza to cook. In this case trying to calculate the rate of heat transfer to the pizza what it might depend on, all the way to temperature changes etc. The educational goal is for students to develop skills in figuring out how to approximately model a complex device so that the science involved is correct enough to reasonably accurately describe how it performs. Key is often to know what to leave in or out of the model.

It is also a good chance to encourage student writing skills.

The challenge has been how to get good feedback to the students on their work. The TAs are the main source of feedback, but this semester I am also trying peer feedback. Students submit their draft work to a web-site http://cpr.molsci.ucla.edu/ , the website then shuffles the papers, and students are then asked to give feedback on 2-3 other projects. Hopefully the benefit is both ways, by reading other projects students will develop a stronger understanding of modeling, and they will get specific feedback on their project.

So far it has been relatively smooth, with the largest concern being that the only format you can submit is plain text, i.e. all equations, figures, tables, graphs are lost. I will suggest to the designers of the site, that they consider pdf uploads as well

Exam results

The first exam came in with a class average of 55% :( There were many concerns raised on the course discussion board, one was the lack of time, so I will extend the time in the next exam by 30 min.

A more subtle issue is which questions the students did well on, and which ones they did not do well on. Across pretty much all the content areas, questions that were direct applications of a single core equation or skill scored very high. I grouped these and the average is ~ 70%.

However for questions that required a combination of two ideas, the percentage of correct answers dropped, to a class average for this group of questions of ~ 40%.

There are many calls from the students to provide a larger formula sheet, or more example problems in recitation, or... I understand this, but I do not think that this will help address the core challenge, in fact it may make it worse. Students taking the course are heading to a variety of quantitative careers, engineering, science, business. The number one goal is for students to develop skills that go beyond the straightforward application of ideas and to combine information in novel ways. I understand that this is challenge for students, and that this is not their typical experience of a university course. But I want students to strive for this higher goal.

All the components of the course are designed to give students multiple opportunities to develop these skills, the complex problem-sets, multi-faceted problems on Tue recitations, the group projects, the multi-content questions on the exams. I will continue to work with the students to help them as much as I can. I also hope that students will strive for these higher goals as well.

first exam!

The first exam is Wed. I think it is a fair exam, with a mix of conceptual and quantitative questions. Some questions are designed that the majority of students should get correct to establish a reasonable floor in the score. Other questions are harder, and hopefully serve as some discriminatory power.

But as always I am nervous to see how much the students have understood and how well they do. I hope well