Just thinking out loud here…
I want a course design that communicates very clearly to students, in every aspect of its framing and detail, that learning is something they must willfully pursue, not something that just “happens” if they’re obedient hoop-jumpers.
I want a course design that communicates very clearly to students what specific actions they can be taking to learn the course content — including the “cognitive actions” that make things like “textbook reading” effective.
I want a course design that gives students clear feedback on whether they’re really “getting” the things they’re supposed to be learning, and at a level adequate to build subsequent learning upon. This feedback should come “automatically” through engagement with the learning tasks, not only when I deliberately assess (formatively or summatively).
I want a course design that helps students really learn what thorough “understanding” feels like, so that they’ll know when they don’t yet really understand something.
Is there a problem-based learning or project-based learning design that accomplishes these things? Because telling students that “you should be reading the book, and working through the accompanying workbook, and doing the homework, and seeking help from me or other students when you need it” doesn’t seem to be adequate for a distressingly large fraction of my current class — even with the best in-class clicker-supported “active learning” that I can manage. And with standards-based grading.
(In fact, SBG may be hurting: The notion of reassessment seems to have been widely interpreted as “It doesn’t really matter how abysmally I’m doing, because I’ll be able to reassess everything eventually.” To the point that in this morning’s class, as I introduced the impulse-momentum theorem with a worksheet motivating impulse, a student asked me “What is the relationship between acceleration and velocity?” <face-palm/>)
I’m with you on almost of all this (both the ideals and the complaints). However, I think one reason I don’t have as much reassessment problems is that my SBG quizzes are twice-weekly quizzes, but we still have non-sbg high-stakes tests. I close re-assessments on the date of the exam–the exam being the last chance to show me you’ve learned that. While that may be anti-sbg-philosophy, it puts some heat to the fire on students, and keeps me from having to do reassessments forever. My SBG assessments are there to help them do well on some third-party exam. They don’t put it off, because they can’t.
I also very much agree that we need to do more to scaffold students’ reading comprehension strategies. Students really struggle to learn from the reading, and I don’t think it’s all laziness. It’s seems to be both lacking cognitive strategies for reading and lacking a strong feeling for what understanding feels like.
I’m thinking that there’s an opportunity for a juicy research study on what “understanding” means to students…
I’m with you on the ideas of problem/project based learning. I find myself really wanting to design a class that helps students learn the physics content I wish to teach as part of an effort to take on big projects that are more than building mousetrap cars or rube goldberg machines. Of course, you probably don’t do stuff like this in college. But why can’t we have students dig into real projects like improving the design of a solar cooker, or doing a study of the dangers of texting while driving? This would imply a significant content sacrifice, and I wonder if students who do enough physics to understand the dangers of texting while driving can transfer their understanding to be able to solve standard 1-d kinematics problems they would likely see on standardized assessment, but I think there must be a way to have students engage deeper, more meaningful assignments from the earliest forays in introductory physics.
I need to find projects that motivate/promote/contextualize learning of the skills and knowledge that downstream courses will require: for my physics majors, and also for my chem, comp sci, etc. majors. I’m sure that’s possible…
One of my main SBG concerns is how to help students not shoot themselves in the foot with procrastination. I would favor using something like a weighted average using their first (25%) and last (75%) assessments. This holds them responsible for trying to stay on top of things “in the moment” but rewards them greatly for improving as well.
I hear you, Joss — but that feels *wrong* to me, because it “sells out” on the principle of “your grade measures what you’ve learned at the end of the course, and nothing else.” One of the primary attractions SBG has for me is that grades measure knowledge (presumably), not effort or obedience or other confounded crap.
Maybe I’m just too idealistic for this job. *sigh*
I think that it is fair to make some compromises for the sake of helping students be successful in what is likely to be their one and only SBG course. It’s hard to expect them to throw out all their regular academic strategies for a single course, and to get it right that first time.
An alternate way that I have been thinking of it is like when working on your Masters or PhD. You are ultimately judged by your final thesis and defense, but the conference talks and posters that you present along are not wiped out. Everything that you do along way has some weight in how you are perceived as an academic afterward.
I don’t teach physics. But isn’t “What’s the relationship between acceleration and velocity?” precisely the sort of question they need to be asking if they don’t understand something? My thinking here is that maybe you’ve moved this student a few inches in the right direction by getting him/her to look for relationships (instead of, say, algorithms to be applied to textbook problems).
Hi, Christopher.
Yes, I *do* want them to be asking about the relationship between acceleration and velocity… but back during week 1, in the unit on kinematics, not *after* we’ve had two successive exams on kinematics and Newton’s laws, as we’re opening up impulse and momentum.
I mean *sigh* yes I do want them to ask that question even at this point in the semester, if they’re still struggling with that; but THEY SHOULDN’T BE STRUGGLING WITH THAT ANY MORE! What distresses me is that this student can’t possibly have been making any sense at all out of the last five-plus weeks of class, if they’re still stuck on this. And they haven’t done anything about that. They’ve just sat there confused, class after class, not speaking up, not coming to my office, not using the online homework (with tutorials and feedback and such) to learn from. And this isn’t one isolated student. Passive helplessness seems to be endemic.
(Sorry, that was a bit of venting.)
Cheers,
:Ian
Hey Ian,
I feel like I’m bombing your blog with comments, I’m really interested in your experience as college-level Physics teachers struggling with the same issues as I do with high school Physics.
I have found a couple of curriculum models that were helpful in putting together a standards-based, inquiry-based Physics course. One is the SCALE-UP program at NC State. Although it is very technology-based the design principles are solid. Another is Modeling approach.
Bomb away! These comments and suggestions really help me challenge my own thinking and get new ideas.
SCALE-UP is appealing, but requires way more up-front investment of money, space redesign, course redesign time, and buy-in from my department than I can realistically get at present. Perhaps down the road a bit…
I want to learn more about the Modeling approach, as it gets implemented at the college level. I know that Eric Brewe at FIU uses it, and would love to (a) visit to see, and (b) pick his brains sometime about implementation.
Recently, I’ve been (re)reading Wiggins’ Understanding by Design and Fink’s Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses, which tell me a lot about why I’m dissatisfied with how we currently teach physics. My head is a bubbling idea soup…
:Ian