Author Archives: Andrew Read

Late drop

Last Friday was the last chance for students to drop the course and not have it show in their GPAs.  We lost just 12 students. Incredibly, some of those had full attendance and grades that could easily have been lifted to A’s with a bit of effort.

Go big or go home is a common saying on campus. Kudos to the 90% who did not go home. Each year it staggers me that there are students who waste their tuition dollars, time, energy and (more importantly to me) a place in my class, all to protect their precious GPA. The GPA is the single most damaging number in higher education metrics. Truly brave universities would get rid of it. I’m told we can’t because some of our Colleges actually select students based on their GPA. I wonder why. It just encourages students to play it safe and avoid or drop challenging courses. No way to encourage them to go big.

For those wondering what just happened to their grades

Angel, the course management system, calculates an overall grade in real time. This is good, but it means that as new components of the final grade come in, some grades adjust downwards. This generates a lot of email traffic. This is my generic explanation of what just happened.

I just released the attendance grade for the first time. Students have to be at nine pop quizzes to get this (worth 10% of final grade). We have now done nine, so regular attenders just got their 10%; those who have yet to be at nine just got a zero. They will get their 10% when they hit nine quizzes (and there will at least three more before end of semester). But for now, that means those who have missed any pop quizzes had their score go down by 10%. The scores of the other altered slightly as Angel re-weighted the various components of the grade to include the attendance score.

Culture wars

To Dr Harlene Hayne, Vice-Chancellor***, Otago University, New Zealand

Dear Harlene,

As an Otago graduate (Zoology, Class of 1984), I’ve always enjoyed your articles in our Alumni Magazine. Congratulations, btw, on five years in the job. I hope the next five are as good for you and the university as the last five.

Here at Penn State, I am a research professor most of the time. But for 15 challenging weeks a year, I teach 365 non-science majors about science. I’ve been doing it since 2010, and each year I am amazed by just how hard it is. I have a high bar (and struggle with how high set it) and I do everything I can to get the students over that bar — except lower it. I also expect (demand) that the students seize control of their own learning. But many of my students just hate it (they want A’s on a plate) and most of my colleagues don’t much care for my efforts or standards.

And so it’s a struggle. I’ve often wondered why I bother. No one would complain if I aimed low. But now, thanks to your recent article, I know where my teaching aspirations come from. You went on US tour to get feedback from the US students who do Study Abroad at Otago and, in your words, everyone

… reported that the academic standard at Otago was much higher than that of their home institution. I was constantly told that the American students – many of whom came to us from highly selective, and extremely expensive private universities – had to work twice as hard at Otago as they did at home.

They also told me that Otago required students to think for themselves and to take responsibility for their own learning; that Otago fostered a sense of independence that was initially a bit daunting to many of them.

So that’s it! My aspirations are Otago’s fault. Ironic that you, an American in a NZ university have the perspective to explain to me, a NZer in an American university, what’s going on.

Well, here’s to the ‘smart, ambitious and warm-hearted, edgy‘ Otago people who shaped me. To name just three still on your books: AlisonEwan and Alan. You’ve made me realize their reach is long and their contribution to my professional discomfort great. I am sure my own students will one day thank them. I do.

andrew

 

 

 

 

Dr Andrew Read FRS
Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and Entomology
Eberly Professor of Biotechnology
Director, Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics.

This from Otago's recruitment literature...

A major reason I had a fantastic time at Otago University (1981-1984).

***In US speak, the Vice-Chancellor is the University President.

Extra credit calculations con't.

We just released a slug of grades, meaning that students who did not do well start thinking about extra credit options (good) and how they are calculated (ok, but better to spend time reviewing class material, blogging or actually earning extra credit). Any how, the calculations, and further to my last post about this: we cap extra credit at 10% (ie students can have added to their actual class grade a maximum of 10% extra). That means no matter how much extra credit they actually earn, we never add more than 10%.

That 10% is added using the extra credit option in Angel, which shows everything out of 100%. So 6% extra credit shows in Angel as 60/100 extra credit, and the maximum allowable is 100/100 = 10% added.

Class Test 3: sigh

unhappy-face-clipart-best-md1kpo-clipartI don’t recall ever being quite so disappointed by a set of test results. I didn’t think the test was especially hard, and certainly no harder than Class Test 2. But the grades are down. The average score among those who took the test was 74% (C), down from 77% (C+) in the last class test and 79% (C+) in the first test. That is a trend so going in the wrong direction.

The specifics: A, 11; A-, 15; B+, 33; B, 41; B-, 47; C+, 38; C, 24; D, 59; Fail, 46; No shows 19. One student got 26/28 and 7 students got 100% on my ask-28-questions-grade-out-of-25 algorithm (down from 9 last time and 20 the time before). The number of A’s was down (from 15 and 42), as was the number of B+’s (down from 46 and 40). The only growth area is the C+’s (this time up from 27). So my strongly bimodal distribution of earlier tests now has less of a valley in the middle. Hardly an achievement.

So what’s going on? Possible explanations:.

  1. The test was impossible. But a dozen students did outstandingly well, so the test was do-able.
  2. There were some badly worded questions. I won’t know until I talk to the students, but looking at them, that’s not obvious to me. There were a few questions where I had slung in some class slogans (e.g. correlation does not equal causation) that were perfectly correct answers to questions I wasn’t asking. Those always seem to cause problems (ie test understanding). I think people recognize the slogan and opt for it without thinking about the question. That’s sobering. There was also a question about whether the study in the the media report was a randomized control trial (it was), but to realize that, you had to read the report and think about it. Most of the students having incorrectly decided it was an observational study then got the next two questions wrong (since RCTs but not observational studies allow you to rule out reverse causation and third variables). But other than that, I can’t see any real question-related issues.
  3. Nobody got the guest speakers. Five of the questions revolved around the recent presentations of our two guest speakers, Mike Mann and Doug Cavener. I reviewed both those presentations with the class following their visits. Attendance at all three of those sessions was poor (just 75% of the class present when I went back over what they’d said), and that can’t have helped. But looking at four of those five questions, the majority of the students got them right: 88%, 64%, 63% and 59% (which, if non-attendance was fatal, translates to 100%, 85%, 84% and 78%). Only 30% of the class got the fifth question right. This concerned Dean Cavener’s work to put a giraffe gene into mice. He is not doing that to test the power of new gene editing technology or to test evolution (why would he do that? — both of those have already been thoroughly demonstrated). No, he’s doing it to see if a genetic difference correlated with the height difference between giraffes and their nearest relatives is actually a cause of height difference. I really thought I went over that well in class. Clearly we need to do some work on correlation/causation, and maybe revisit gene editing and evolution, but that’s just one question — not enough to sink the class average.
  4. Study groups are working together and group-think is misleading them. This is a possibility. The students are supposed to do the tests alone. And they pledge to that effect. It’s an integrity violation to work with others. It can also be dangerous if the blind are leading the blind….
  5. Too few people have been to review sessions. That’s certainly true. Is this the problem? How to fix that? I can’t do review sessions in class. No one complained that they couldn’t make reviews last time or asked for other sessions to be put on. Maybe after these grades, some more students will make the effort to review things.
  6. People are really not understanding things. This is a serious possibility. The questions all variants of what I used in previous years. People are not getting all the same things wrong (exceptions above); they are getting diverse things wrong and more than in previous years. I am not sure why. This year I have been going much more slowly through material, and I thought if anything explaining things better. I wonder if my focus this year on soft skills has been taking up so too much class time. It might be better to spend more time probing the concepts from different directions (that’s what builds real understanding) rather than talking of phones, study skills and time management.

So what to do? I won’t really have a good understanding of the misunderstandings until I do the first review session and see what students are missing. Hopefully we can do that first review session tomorrow so I can get a real sense of what’s happening asap.

I want to do everything I can to help students over this bar. Except lower it.

Mid-course SELF-evaluation

I do a mid-course evaluation to find out what I could do better on the remainder of the course. For the first time, I asked the students what they could do to help themselves do better. The most common answers (in bold the number of students who said that):

Take better notes 62
Be less lazy; not procrastinate 60
Focus – pay more attention 60
Review material/class notes more after class 54
See/resort to TA’s/meet with them 53
Ask more questions 44
Turn off electronics/phone 39
Study more 38
Blog more frequently/regularly/earlier 36
Time management 21
Review pop quizzes & tests 12
Attend study sessions/review 10
Attend more office hours 9
Do more extra credit work 8
Sit up front 7

All remarkably similar to the wisdom from last year (learning, grade).

As for what I could do better to help the students learn better? Most requests actually revolved around how they could get a better grade. And the most common requests? More on what makes a good blog, more on test preparation, and could I please require less blogging and make the tests easier. I take the first two points, but I really think those things are a work in progress. As for less blogging? 65% of the students think the work load of the course is about right (which makes me think its too light). As for making the tests easier — how hard to stretch people is one of the toughest (and most ignored) questions in Higher Education. They might already be too easy: nobody thinks the course is insufficiently challenging, with 57% thinking it’s about right and 43% saying its too challenging. You gotta stretch students out of their comfort zones. With almost 60% feeling pretty comfortable, I may not have gone far enough.

Things they think I am doing well? 

Picking interesting topics that keep students engaged 73
Answers students’ questions thoroughly 24
Makes students think critically 11
Detailed explanations 10
Extra credits/many chances to improve grade/succeed 10

Most disappointing is the quarter of the class for whom the course is failing to meet their expectations or who are dissatisfied. The most disappointing thing about that is that no one has come to talk to me about anything they are dissatisfied with. I always wish we could link the feedback to the grade book. Are there engaged students who aren’t happy? That would worry me. Or are the unhappy 25% those who are failing because they haven’t done much?  And by even raising that possibility, have I become the doctor who blames his patient’s death on the severity of the disease rather than the quality of the doctoring……..???

Thanks so much to Monica for her fantastic efforts to compile all the data.

Blog Period 2 results: upward

Somehow we lost 17 students from the course since Blog Period 1… sigh. None of them ever came talk to me about their options. Maybe they dropped out for reasons other than the course.

Of the 336 students still registered, 91 did nothing on the blog at all. A further 59 did so little, they failed. On top of that, there were 38 D‘s. The good news is that, believe it or not, that’s fewer fails and D’s than for the first blog period.

performance-improvement-web-picture-pcaaun-clipartBetter, the number of students scoring very well has gone up ten-fold. There were 6 A‘s, 13 A-, 19 B+, 20 B, 22 B-, 40 C+, and 28 C. The average score among the 186 who passed was 78% (C+).

It’s always a little hard to know what to make of that distribution. Some of those who did well last time will not have participated this time (I take the best score from the three periods) and some who did not do anything last time have just tried for the first time (and so have yet to benefit from personalized feedback). Nonetheless, I do take heart that some students had really stretched and things were in general much improved (way more A’s and B’s). The writing that earned those scores cheered up the graders. They found it all quite disheartening in the first blog period (a common reaction for grading newbies who never realize quite how little effort the majority of undergraduates put in).

blogSo, some examples of good practice: I enjoyed learning whether music is helpful (lots of original thinking in that one) and that chicken soup can be (mechanism unclear). Whether brothers make you gay is an important topic with lots of ramifications, some of which I hope to discuss in class in the not too distant future. Also important and well written, the possibility that video games make you sexist, and that weight loss apps don’t work. I also thought this take on sleep was great. Sleep is another topic I hope to get to in class: we do it for a third of our lives and no one knows why. Do dumber people swear more? As an occasional potty mouth myself, I was reassured to find the answer is probably no. There was also important, well written stuff on running to aid mental health, the effect of skipping class on school performance (not good), SADthe dangers of second hand smoke (where the beliefs are far stronger than the data), and whether going to the doctor is actually good for you (it’s almost always good for the doctor’s bank account, so you can trust their answer to that question).  As always, for students interested in improving their blog grade, I strongly recommend taking a look at those examples (not random entries on the blog which are by definition average), scrutinizing the grading rubric, paying serious attention to the feedback from the graders, and looking at the tons and tons of resources to be found here.

Ok….so we now have the list of the 23 students who have yet to do any blogging whatsoever. We’ll write to those folks over the next few weeks begging them to engage. You can’t pass this course without blogging (it’s 40% of the course and the pass grade is 60%). In previous years, some students have failed and told me after they thought blogging was optional… Gotta love it.

A failed time-management carrot

To encourage time management and to discourage procrastination and last minute panic, I give 2% extra credit for anyone who can get their blog posts done five days ahead of time. That’s extra credit for no extra work whatsoever. You’d think everyone would want a piece of that, especially since 2% extra credit is equivalent to raising test scores from a B to an A or blogging scores from a B- to a B+.

Nope. For blog period 2, just 20 students got sufficiently organized to get something for nothing.

Climate change change

Today I reviewed what Mike Mann had said in class about the evidence that climate change is real and mostly due to humans. Then I re-did the poll I took before Mike came to class. Last week, 39% of the students (n= 152 respondents) either didn’t know or disagreed with the statement The earth is warming mostly due to human activity. Today, it was 16% (n=132 respondents). So I guess that’s progress.

But that prompted some scary stuff on the comment wall:

There are bigger issues going on in the world that need our immediate attention. War, violence, the economy.
Climate change isn’t happening because humans are not superior to god’s will.
Climate scientists are going to hell because they are saying humans are superior to god’s will.
Everything that happens with global warming is due to nature and god, not humans. God is superior to us and determines what happens to earth.
I know global warming is fake because my uncle is a republican congressman and says so.
VACCINES CAUSE AUTISM

It’s always a little tricky to tell the comedy from the reality.

More constructively, I had a really good idea for a teachable moment. Following Mike Mann’s forceful presentation last class, I polled the class today:

132 respondents

132 respondents

And that gave me the opening to say that among the 100-500 climate or climate-related scientists on campus (a guess, based on estimating the post-docs and grad students as well as faculty), there was not one….NOT ONE… who would disagree with Mike’s summary of the evidence that climate change is happening and largely man made. That’s the extent of consensus on this. If I wanted to find a climate denier, I’d have to hunt among the non-scientists on campus, and even then probably only among the politically motivated. I pointed out that when TV news does balance, it’s not balance in any real sense. Just a scientist and some talking head. It looks 50:50 but that’s an incorrect impression.

I also used it as a moment to to say that if any of those 100-500 Penn State scientists could convincingly show that climate change was not happening or not man made (or a Chinese invention), that scientist would be famous. That’s why we can be pretty confident when they all agree. Everyone is trying to take down everyone else’s science.  When it stays standing, we have to start to think it might be right.

Well I thought it was a good teachable moment….