Fucking education! How does it work?

[lisarea]

This looks like something you guys might be interested in.

n+1: Learning in Freedom

[Angakuk]

The answer to the OP is: Not very well when the textbooks are crap.

Afraid of Your Child's Math Textbook? You Should Be.

There may be a reason you can’t figure out some of those math problems in your son or daughter’s math text and it might have nothing at all to do with you. That math homework you're trying to help your child muddle through might include problems with no possible solution. It could be that key information or steps are missing, that the problem involves a concept your child hasn’t yet been introduced to, or that the math problem is structurally unsound for a host of other reasons.

<snip>

At the end of this project, the same project manager mused to me aloud, “I want to know who buys this crap.” Crap. That was the word she used after all her exhausting efforts trying to make a silk purse out of this pig’s ear. My reply to her was, “I want to know who buys it twice.” Because that’s the only way educational publishers make money, on repeat sales. Those books are out there now in print, on the shelves in the publisher’s warehouse, being packed and shipped to a school near you. So who are you people who choose to buy these books? Identify yourselves. Because you, too, a part of the problem.

[LadyShea]

This is what our school, and millions of others, use, and it is terrible in my opinion. Mastery is eschewed for lots of premature introductions. Precision is eschewed for estimates.

Everyday Math

By way of background, the Everyday Math program is part of the constructivist or “Chicago” mathematics philosophy. It seeks to provide deeper understanding of math concepts by providing multiple methods of seeking the same answer, by using “spiraling” techniques which cause students to touch on methods and subject areas briefly and to revisit them later in their studies, and by offering students an opportunity to find computational methods with which they are most comfortable. On the flip side, critics say that, whatever the goals of Everyday Math, in practice it is a curriculum which is a mile wide and an inch deep, it is confusing to students who seem to chase their tails finding different computational methods instead of finding the answers, it doesn’t provide enough practice for students to master fact recall, it fails totally in areas like fractions and pre-algebra, and it forces parents or the private tutors they hire to supplement with more traditional methods at home. In other communities across the country and even in our own county Everyday Math has been controversial too.

[mickthinks]

Can you unpack that a little for me, LS? The complaints about Everyday Mathematics have seemingly little to do with the complaints in the article that Ang linked to, about commercial pressures and declining standards in the production of maths textbooks.

[ceptimus]

Things haven't changed much - Richard Feynman's opinion of school text books from 1964 (a long article, but worth reading, if you enjoy the quote below).

Originally Posted by Feynman

Finally I come to a book that says, "Mathematics is used in science in many ways. We will give you an example from astronomy, which is the science of stars." I turn the page, and it says, "Red stars have a temperature of four thousand degrees, yellow stars have a temperature of five thousand degrees . . ." -- so far, so good. It continues: "Green stars have a temperature of seven thousand degrees, blue stars have a temperature of ten thousand degrees, and violet stars have a temperature of . . . (some big number)." There are no green or violet stars, but the figures for the others are roughly correct. It's vaguely right -- but already, trouble! That's the way everything was: Everything was written by somebody who didn't know what the hell he was talking about, so it was a little bit wrong, always! And how we are going to teach well by using books written by people who don't quite understand what they're talking about, I cannot understand. I don't know why, but the books are lousy; UNIVERSALLY LOUSY!

Anyway, I'm happy with this book, because it's the first example of applying arithmetic to science. I'm a bit unhappy when I read about the stars' temperatures, but I'm not very unhappy because it's more or less right -- it's just an example of error. Then comes the list of problems. It says, "John and his father go out to look at the stars. John sees two blue stars and a red star. His father sees a green star, a violet star, and two yellow stars. What is the total temperature of the stars seen by John and his father?" -- and I would explode in horror.

My wife would talk about the volcano downstairs. That's only an example: it was perpetually like that. Perpetual absurdity! There's no purpose whatsoever in adding the temperature of two stars. Nobody ever does that except, maybe, to then take the average temperature of the stars, but not to find out the total temperature of all the stars! It was awful! All it was was a game to get you to add, and they didn't understand what they were talking about. It was like reading sentences with a few typographical errors, and then suddenly a whole sentence is written backwards. The mathematics was like that. Just hopeless!

[LadyShea]

Yeah, it was only somewhat related, sorry about that.

Everyday Math came to prominence in the scramble for curriculum that would lead to passing the NCLB, and was heavily pushed by the publisher (one of the big ones) because it was "scientifically derived" or some shit. There was barely a flip through review by school boards, who are not educators, before implementation in many areas, including ours. It does not follow traditional math models and students, teachers and parents alike have a difficult time with it.

It presents problems involving concepts that aren't introduced yet, and problems with no solutions...as I found trying to help my niece with ratios when they hadn't even covered fraction division yet and story problems too ambiguously worded to be solved.

[LadyShea]

Originally Posted by lisarea

This looks like something you guys might be interested in.

n+1: Learning in Freedom

Did you read the original Slate article?

[lisarea]

I at least skimmed both of them, but sometimes I just put a link to a discussion just because I think other people might be interested, rather than because I have any opinions on it. I think I was doing that.

[Goliath]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

This is what our school, and millions of others, use, and it is terrible in my opinion. Mastery is eschewed for lots of premature introductions. Precision is eschewed for estimates.

Everyday Math

Any time you hear the word "constructivist" in the context of mathematical pedagogy and/or textbooks (but not in the context of mathematical philosophy), you're in for a monumental pile of bullshit.

You see, according to constructivism, Little Johnny shouldn't memorize his multiplication tables, he should construct all of that information by reinventing the wheel.

And while exploration of ideas and rediscovering things for yourself isn't inherently bad, reinventing the wheel on a global scale certainly is.

These battles have been raging for decades; just google "math wars".

Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth

Math Education: A University View

&feature=endscreen&NR=1
ETA: You might ask why it's necessary for kids to understand anything about arithmetic in this age of computers, and that's not, in and of itself, a terrible question. However, in my experience (and in the experience of everyone I've ever known who has taught mathematics at any level), if you don't have a grasp of arithmetic, you won't be able to deal with algebraic expressions. "So what? Computers can deal with those, too!", I hear you ask. Well, yes, computers can do some symbolic calculations, but they don't know what you want unless you're able to tell them. If you don't even know the difference between a + b/c and (a+b)/c, you're screwed.

ETA2: Oh, and by the way, computers and calculators fuck up, too.

[Angakuk]

No exams, learning-based outcomes

I no longer teach any courses with exams. The last one was my introductory course, Principles of Biological Anthropology, which has now gone to weekly quizzes and lab assignments. Sometimes when I tell other professors this, they react with shock. An introductory course with no exams?

Has anyone here had experience with this approach? If so, did you find it effective?

[The Lone Ranger]

I've never taught at an institution that has this policy, but I've known a few people who have. From what I've been able to gather, the answer to the question, "Does this work?" is "It depends."


My impression is that it can work very well if you have well-motivated students. As such, the schools where this approach has been tried and found effective tend to be highly-selective to begin with, and so you're starting out with motivated students who want to learn and will do the assignments without being "forced" to by the threat of exams.

Under those circumstances, both students and teachers tend to love the results, or such is my understanding. (Keep in mind that I have a limited sample size, so make of that what you will.) Teachers enjoy it because they don't have to worry about "teaching to the test" so much, and this allows for freer and more spontaneous classroom discussions. Students tend to enjoy it because the reduced pressure to perform means that they can relax and enjoy the course.

As an aside, I can tell you as a teacher that I probably hate giving tests to a much greater extent than the students hate taking them. Each of them only has to take the test once. I know of few -- if any -- teachers who actually enjoy giving tests.



Also, in fairness, I should point out that some students simply hate the idea of exam-free classes, because they use their grades as a means of comparing themselves to each other. This is usually a factor only in the more competitive programs, however.



Unfortunately if an exam-free environment can work well when you've got selected, highly motivated students, the opposite also applies, it seems. For example, though I dislike giving lots of tests, I find that I have no choice. If I don't give them lots of mini-tests that are designed with the express purpose of "forcing" them to do the assigned readings, most of them simply will not do so. [Quite a lot won't do so anyway, of course.] And then, of course, they wind up failing the course, because they don't learn the material. And, of course, it's always my fault that they failed.


So, as much as I truly hate doing so, I wind up giving lots of tests that I really don't want to give, because otherwise, most of the students won't read the damn assignments, and won't learn the material. Years ago, I taught at a different community college, and the Department Chair literally forbade me to fail students. Believe it or not, it was actually an official policy. Because, as it was explained to me, if a student failed, the school wouldn't receive as much money. So unless a student simply stopped coming to class and didn't take any tests, they literally could not fail the class.

And the students knew it. There were (thankfully!) a few who genuinely wanted to learn and who put in a genuine effort. Unfortunately, that was not true of the majority. That place was a nightmare, as far as I was concerned. I quit in disgust.


In short, I would love to be able to get rid of exams, which I probably hate to a far greater degree than do any of the students. And I would love to be teaching someplace where I felt like I could do that. Unfortunately, this place isn't such a place.


It's a policy that can work -- and very well, from what I understand -- when most or all of your students are taking the class because they want to, and because they're genuinely interested in learning the material. On the other hand, if they're taking the class because they feel it's a hoop they must jump through in order to eventually get a job -- not so much. Such is my impression, anyway.


Cheers,

Michael

[Angakuk]

If I read Hawks' article correctly he does use quizzes on a regular basis, just no major unit or final exams. I don't know enough about the University of Wisconsin at Madison to say whether it is the sort of highly selected institution that you refer to. My guess is, that as a state university, it probably isn't. On the other hand, we are talking about anthropology courses and I doubt that there are very many students who take those without having a genuine interest in the subject.

[The Lone Ranger]

I would love to be able to simply give occasional quizzes in order to judge progress and understanding, and do away with formal exams entirely. I'm pretty-much certain that it could never work where I'm teaching at the moment, however.


But then, there are exams and there are exams. The way that exams are given here is not the proper way to do it, in my opinion. (But I don't get to make the rules, so my opinion isn't of much worth on that issue.)

Here, we give the students in each class several non-cumulative exams per semester (typically 4). If you're going to give exams, this is not the way to do it, in my opinion, because it encourages the wrong kind of "studying." What typically happens is that since the students know that the exams are not cumulative, they know that they only have to demonstrate knowledge of the material covered since the previous exam -- and so they cram.

What I mean is that, instead of learning the material as we go, and so fitting it all together, quite a large percentage of them make little or no effort to learn it as we go. Instead, they spend the day before each exam "cramming" to get as much of the relevant material into their heads as they can. This is the worst possible study strategy. What inevitably happens is that they retain just enough to pass the exam -- and then promptly forget it.

Based upon the results of my frequent attempts to engage students in classroom discussion of the material that they've supposedly read and studied, in order to gauge their knowledge and understanding of the material, I'm absolutely convinced that in several of my classes half or more of the students literally know nothing at the end of the semester that they didn't know at the beginning. Even though they've managed to pass each exam.

Well, I'm sure that even the worst of them managed to retain at least a little. But even so, it's incredibly frustrating to -- at the end of the semester -- try to get students to demonstrate a basic understanding of stuff that we've been discussing on a daily basis for literally the entire semester (say, diffusion), only to have them look at me as if I were speaking in Sanskrit.


Note that I'm not saying they're stupid. Exactly the opposite, actually. They've figured out how to game the system, and how to "earn" a passing grade without going to all the bother of actually learning anything.


Thank goodness, this isn't true of every student -- probably not even the majority of them. But it seems to be true of a shockingly high percentage of them. And I think that it's largely because of a system that is set up -- deliberately so, I sometimes suspect in my darker moments -- to encourage students not to learn, but to play the system.

But then, as I've lamented here on numerous occasions, the Administration has made it abundantly clear that they're far more concerned about paying bodies in the seats than they are about whether or not the students are actually learning anything.





When I was in college, the testing system made a lot more sense, in my opinion.

First of all, we were given frequent quizzes in most of my classes. These performed several useful functions -- for one thing, it allowed us (the students) to see how we were doing, without the anxiety engendered by a full-on exam; perhaps more importantly, it allowed the instructor to see how we were doing, so that (s)he could tailor his/her lectures accordingly.

In most of my classes, there were 2 and only 2 exams -- a midterm and a final. Both were cumulative, and we were made very aware of that fact from day one. This meant that each student understood perfectly well that we had to do the assigned readings, come to class and participate, and otherwise actually learn the material, because a "study strategy" that depended on trying to "cram" an entire semester's worth of material the day before the final would be pretty-much guaranteed to lead to failure.

This is not to say that there wasn't plenty of "cramming" on the day before the finals, as each person tried to cram in a few more hopefully-relevant facts. But even the laziest student was very well-aware that if you didn't make a serious effort to keep up with the material during the course of the semester and to learn it as we went along, there was little or no hope of actually passing the class.

Such is my impression, anyway.



Cheers,

Michael

[Doctor X]

Have to agree with that. I had the pleasure studying in England where, basically, your entire degree depends on your final exams and perhaps a project at the end of your final year. Granted, you do not want to tank your first and second year, but the weight is far less.

Also, you tend to have one exam--at the end of the year. The stereotype I was given was that students partied until about March and then were never seen again until the exams in May. What you studied--in a completely different course--back in October shows up in May.

I over-simplify a bit in that you do have practical work during the year, meetings with tutors and the like, but the bottom line is you are expected to master the material. As you suggest there IS cramming--those amino acid structures? Remember how you had to analyze a protein with enzyme cleavage? Sure, you memorize all of those "tools" "the night before" but you had better have, on your own, prepared to answer the essay questions.

Strange enough, the departments made their previous tests available to consult. OH NOES t3h CHEATINGS!!111!!

Well, if you can memorize a number of essay answers to science tests? Good luck! Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to study the humanities, but others reported similar things--be prepared to right a long essay on a number of topics that demonstrated you absorbed the meet of the subject.

There are drawbacks--a bad day can ruin your life, literally. I often thought a balance of that would work.

--J.D.

[Qingdai]

Many of our classes are cumulative. Also you have to take exams before entering clinic and before graduating that are cumulative. They do last several days. One bad day couldn't ruin your life, a bad week might.
Then the licensing exam is also cumulative.

[Clutch Munny]

Originally Posted by Angakuk

No exams, learning-based outcomes

Has anyone here had experience with this approach? If so, did you find it effective?

I use exams as conveniences. Alas, with large classes and too few TA resources, the grading-intensive nature of continuous assessment is hard to get around. I've used peer review as a partial workaround, but it ain't the same.

I'm always on the lookout to find good tradeoffs between convenience, pedagogy and fairness in grading. Sometimes this works okay. Sometimes not. For example, multiple choice exams aren't great diagnostics of someone's grasp of the concepts, in my view, and can be gamed to a certain extent. So I tried a computerized "multiple select" exam for a midterm a couple of years back, for a large critical thinking class. The idea behind multiple select is that any of the answers can be right, for each question. (I.e., as few as zero and as many as all of them.)

To ensure that people don't just pick every answer, you introduce a cost for wrong answers. If you make the cost high enough, you can tell students that they are better to leave an answer blank than they are to guess. One upside of the instrument is that all the work is front-loaded; once you put the thing together, the grading is automated. So it satisfies the grading resources constraint. On the other hand, it is a pretty fine-grained instrument for testing people's familiarity and confidence in the details of the material. Merely responding to keywords or eliminating known falsehoods is never enough to succeed. So it upholds academic standards. Awesome!

So, what happened was, this carefully constructed and detailed exam perpetrated a mass execution of my students, and I had to mathematically reanimate the bloody and badly mangled remains of their grades. I don't think this was because it didn't accurately diagnose their grasp of the concepts; the problem was that it did. In fact, one of the more alarming things was that it was an equal-opportunity instrument of academic death; I had to use some statistical jiggery-pokery to reconstitute a useful distribution. Which suggested that, in the normal case, a fair bit of the distribution of the grades was explained by students being better and worse at the auxiliary exam-handling strategies that the multiple select exam vitiated, and not having better and worse grasps of the material per se.

Dang. Innovation can lead to depressing moments.

So, I'm going to keep using the multiple select approach, but I'm going to make the exams easier. I can update youse on how that goes, if at some point you remind me.

[Angakuk]

I had a history teacher in High School who used the traditional form of the multiple choice exam (or, as he called them, Mickey Mouse tests). However, his tests were possibly the most difficult and demanding I ever took. Students who were used to aceing tests were sometimes reduced to tears when they got one of his exams back (my older sister, a straight A student, never scored above a C on one of his tests). Because the final grade for the class was graded on the curve the fact that students seldom did well on his test was not particularly relevant to the final grade. I believe he was seriously disheartened when one of the kid geniuses in my class got an A on one of his tests. That had never happened in his class before. The rest of the class was, I might add, equally disheartened because that asshole's A screwed up the curve for the rest of us. At least we thought it was going to. I think that, in the end, the teacher threw that A out as an outlier and did not allow it to distort the curve.

With regard to the Hawks article, he is not very specific in describing the weekly evaluations, but he does say this about them.

One benefit is greater classroom time for more material and interactions with students. I have added weekly in-class evaluations, and I have not subtracted any classroom time from instruction.

[Qingdai]

I've been party to the multiple choice select tests before. Since students aren't familiar with them in our area, they fall into the old standard of "pick the closest to right answer you can find" test taking strategy.
Our professor called them different things, "multiple choice type A, B, C" and so on.
Even if you knew the material, the old habits of multiple test taking screwed the results. That would have been helpful if we had known that test A would mean there could be more than one right answer, or Test C meant there could be no right answer. We just weren't familiar with the short hand the professor was using to indicate what the possibilities could be.

[davidm]

I haven't read this entire thread, so maybe this point already came up. But my question to The Lone Ranger would be, what about finding employment at a small liberal arts college? My impression (possibly wrong at least in some cases) is that learning at such places is valued for learning, and that these colleges are not pay-for-grade mills.

I sometimes read P.Z. Myers' blog, though I am not a fan of his for a number of reasons. But I note he does teach at a small liberal arts college that does seem to value learning and not selling grades, and in the past he has mentioned that there were openings at his college for biology instructors.

[Doctor X]

Not to write for TLR--at least . . . not without my substantial fee--but he needs to have his Union Ticket "punched" as it were: tenure. Leaving before tenure is sort of a "black mark."

From his other posts, it looks like he is a practical "shoe-in" though nothing is guaranteed until it happens. Then he can look for another position without fear of getting summarily canned.

--J.D.

[The Lone Ranger]

Yeah, my ultimate goal is to wind up in some small, private 4-year liberal-arts college where I can settle in and teach bright, enthusiastic students who want to learn -- and perhaps more importantly, where the school's administration is more concerned about whether or not the students are learning than whether or not they have enough warm, paying bodies sitting in the seats.

The quality of private liberal arts colleges varies quite a bit, as I've definitely learned from experience. But there are some really good, exclusive schools out there that value the quality of instruction above all else. I'm really hoping that I can wind up at such a place.


But Doctor X is correct; first I must get tenure. Fortunately, the Dean herself has told me that I'm a shoo-in. If I let it be known that I was considering a position elsewhere without the protection of tenure, I could be fired outright for "disloyalty" or some such thing.

If/when I have tenure, I'll be much more employable, because potential employers will know that I've proved that I have what it takes to be a valuable "permanent" asset to the school. And a potential employer will be leery about hiring someone who has not gained tenure; they'll be thinking "Is he wanting to leave because he doesn't want to stay (and if so, why not?), or because he knows he isn't going to be granted tenure (and if so, why not?)?".

So, ironically, I'm waiting for tenure so that I can start seeking employment elsewhere. Kind of a funny situation, when looked at that way.

Originally Posted by Doctor X

From his other posts, it looks like he is a practical "shoe-in" though nothing is guaranteed until it happens. Then he can look for another position without fear of getting summarily canned.

Exactly.


By this time next year, I hope to be zealously searching for employment elsewhere. Or better yet, to have already secured such a position.

Cheers,

Michael

[davidm]

Oh, right, the tenure thing!

Basically, lacking tenure you can't (or shouldn't) apply for a job anywhere else. But once you get it you are in a much better position.

Well, since it seems you will get tenure (when?) then you can start looking for work at a decent, small liberal arts college and not a diploma mill. And get out of Michigan, a plus in its own right, although the Upper Peninsula is one of the most beautiful places in the country. Maybe there is a lib arts college up there?

[Janet]

I had a class once where the test was true or false, but the answer had to be completely true to be true, and he was very picky. You got something like 3 points for each right answer and minus one for each wrong one and nothing for a blank. You had to tell him which 50 of I don't remember how many questions you wanted graded by circling them. I did very well because I'm good at test taking and logic problems, but I had class mates who worked much harder than I did at learning the material who did badly because their brains just didn't work that way.

[Clutch Munny]

The downside is that, having tenure, you are only eligible for senior searches. These were always rare, and are getting rarer as administrators try to save money by swapping retiring senior profs for the cheapest junior profs they can get.

The sad fact is that, if you really want to be in demand at another institution, get into administration and get a reputation as a hatchet man.

[Clutch Munny]

Originally Posted by davidm

once you get [tenure] you are in a much better position.

Oops, I was responding to this in particular. Sorry, Janet -- I don't have you on ignore!