Exams: All together now?

Group work and exams are perennial topics of interest here at ISW. So has anyone tried to combine these, making use of group exams? I've never done it myself and have a pretty clear idea of why people would avoid it. But has anyone out there tried group exams or evaluations in a philosophy class? If so, what was the format? And was it successful? (Or maybe you've been on the other side: Has anyone been made to take a group exam in a philosophy class?)

On Course, #3: Teaching with Technology

In this chapter, James Lang stakes out what I think of as a moderate position on the use of technology in teaching, neither Luddite nor naive enthusiast. He points to some of the advantages, both pedagogical and professional, of integrating technology into our teaching, but also denies that we need to "radically restructure education" (44) in order to meet the needs of Millennials or digital natives. I'm inclined to agree, inasmuch as in order to teach effectively with technology, you have to know how to teach effectively in the first place. As Lang puts it, "the basic principles of teaching and learning" apply in "whatever environment we and our students find ourselves." Indeed, he goes so far as to allow that effective teaching can be extremely low-tech: "you do not need to make use of technology in any way to be an effective teacher." (59)

Lang doesn't dwell on specific technologies in the chapter, which is wise given that (a) many technologies have a short shelf life and are quickly rendered obsolete, and (b) the start-up costs of mastering a wholly unfamiliar technology are high.

The one technology Lang focuses on are learning mangagement systems (LMS's), a la Blackboard, Sakai, Moodle, WebCT, etc. He notes four uses for LMS's:

1. They facilitate the use of various multimedia in the classroom. I try to show videos, use photographs, etc. when I can. As we've discussed here before, philosophy is a discipline that's not especially congenial to those with a strongly visual approach to learning, so we should at least try to augment the highly verbal-textual content with visual materials. Does anyone have any examples from their own teaching of innovative uses of multimedia?
2. LMS's create an organized course space that will automatically tabulate grades, etc.
3. They provide a documentary history for one's teaching (useful for promotion and tenure), as well as making it easy to draw upon old course materials to create new courses and materials. I have to say that I've become highly reliant on Blackboard as a repository of quizzes, writing assignments, etc., that I can use to design or revise courses.
4. LMS's offer discussion boards to build community among students, enabling those less willing to speak openly in class contribute to the class discussions on their own terms. Lang has some nice ideas as to how to use the boards: scanning their content to identify common learning challenges the students are facing, the 'log assignment' (pp. 50-51), etc. He recommends making participation in the discussing boards mandatory rather than optional, lest you end up with the e-quivalent of "crickets chirping." That certainly echoes my experience. Students will not contribute to these discussion boards unless they're required to do so. My sense is that the novelty of participating in these boards wore off a long time ago. On the other hand, I've not been entirely happy with the outcome even when I have required students to contribute to online discussion boards. In many respects, the very problems that occur in classroom discussion replicate themselves in online forums. Students write without thinking, have not prepared by reading the material, don't engage very deeply with one another's ideas, make pro forma efforts ("That's so true," "I agree with that," etc.). There are exceptions, of course — and perhaps my own experience is exceptional — but I've formed the provisional hypothesis that online discussion works well only when students already have the skills and attitudes that enable useful offline discussion (and only a few students have those skills and attitudes). But I'd be most interested in hearing others' thoughts on the use of online discussion.

This links to one last remark I wanted to offer. Lang's chapter is about teaching with technology but says relatively little about students learning with technology. This is a bit of a surprise, considering how I praised Lang in an earlier post for highlighting the shift from teaching to learning:

The simple observation that the question 'what or how should I teach?' is subordinate to the question 'what will students learn?' is still revolutionary, despite the fact approaching teaching in terms of student learning is now the central theme of almost all the literature on college teaching.

Yet as some of my recent posts might suggest, the main issue with technology is not our using it, but our using it to help students learn. And I'm somewhat pessimistic that our students know how to use technology to learn, regardless of how adept they are at using technology.

Next up will be a topic dear to all our hearts (lecturing), but please take this chance to share your thoughts and ideas about teaching with technology.

Update on digital students

When I last lamented the challenges presented by technology-infatuated Millennial generation students, several of our astute commenters were skeptical (perhaps understandbly) that this group of students really does bring a coherent set of attitudes or abilities to their academic studies.

So here's one for those skeptics: In an article 'Generational myth' (Chronicle of Higher Ed), Siva Vaidhyanathan tries to pour cold water on the claim that a generation of tech-savvy students exists:


A tidbit from the article:

I have been hearing some version of the "kids today" or "this generation believes" argument for more than a dozen years of studying and teaching about digital culture and technology. As a professor, I am in the constant company of 18- to-23-year-olds. I have taught at both public and private universities, and I have to report that the levels of comfort with, understanding of, and dexterity with digital technology varies greatly within every class. Yet it has not changed in the aggregate in more than 10 years.

Every class has a handful of people with amazing skills and a large number who can't deal with computers at all. A few lack mobile phones. Many can't afford any gizmos and resent assignments that demand digital work. Many use Facebook and MySpace because they are easy and fun, not because they are powerful (which, of course, they are not). And almost none know how to program or even code text with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Only a handful come to college with a sense of how the Internet fundamentally differs from the other major media platforms in daily life.

College students in America are not as "digital" as we might wish to pretend. And even at elite universities, many are not rich enough. All this mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims that kids won't read books are just not true. Our students read books when books work for them (and when I tell them to). And they all (I mean all) tell me that they prefer the technology of the bound book to the PDF or Web page.

Much of what Vaidhyanathan proceeds to say strikes me as sensible: that generalizations about generations are dangerous and imprecise; that they tend to overlook diversity, especially economic diversity; that it would be unwise to upend well-established educational practices to fit the learning habits of a few students who are technologically sophisticated. I would also add that I think we need to make the case for the limits of digital technology and technology generally — that there's a reason to read the Republic rather than watch the movie.

At the same, though, Vaidhyanathan hits on exactly what I think is hard about integrating technology into our teaching. Students, even the technologically sophisticated ones, know little about how to use technology to learn. Oh, students can use technology a thousand different ays. But what we should be worried about isn't whether they know HTML. It's a matter of whether they can distinguish reputable WWW sources and unreputable ones, for example. It's a matter of whether they can watch a YouTube video on a controversial ballot measure and decode it rather than being swayed by its misleading suggestions or imagery. It's a matter of whether they take advantage of the awesome power afforded them by modern word processing technology to actually revise their work. It's a matter of being able to communicate meaningfully in a digital forum beyond "I agree with that." And if we expect students, whatever their level of technological know-how, to learn through technology, then these are the things we need to emphasize, not knowledge of programming languages.

Maybe James Lang will help us out with these issues on Wednesday!

Follow the Wake!

Folks might notice that I put a link on the right to enable ISW readers to follow our blog. Please become a follower if you so desire. It's a great way to keep up with what's happening here.

Staying 'On Course', part 3: Teaching with technology

Coming to a blog near you: James Lang on teaching and technology. Stay tuned for our discussion this coming Wednesday, October 29!

A No Longer Teaching Philosophy Blog

Here is a new blog called "Leaving Academia Behind" that some ISW readers might find interesting. The blog's author (and others pondering similar moves) would, I'd guess, appreciate anyone's relevant experiences, observations and advice. Here's the blurb about it:

"This blog has been created to explain my decision to leave academia behind. In addition, I hope that it can serve as a guide to those in a similar situation. I know that when I first made the decision I did not know what I'd be doing next. Discovering that there are things to do outside of academia took some time and hopefully this blog can help speed that up."

Judging one's own competence, or Yikes!

We've identified and diagnosed the illusion of understanding in the past: that students often presume they have mastered a body of knowledge when in fact their understanding of it is superficial at beast.

I was therefore intrigued by some of the research findings about our ability to judge our own competence discussed in this Salon article:

Unfortunately, cognitive science offers some fairly sobering observations about our ability to judge ourselves and others.

Perhaps the single academic study most germane to the present election is the 1999 psychology paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments." The two Cornell psychologists began with the following assumptions.

1. Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
2. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
3. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.

To put their theories to the test, the psychologists asked a group of Cornell undergraduates to undergo a series of self-assessments, including tests of logical reasoning taken from a Law School Admissions Test preparation guide. Prior to being shown their test scores, the subjects were asked to estimate how they thought they would fare in comparison with the others taking the tests.

On average, participants placed themselves in the 66th percentile, revealing that most of us tend to overestimate our skills somewhat. But those in the bottom 25 percent consistently overestimated their ability to the greatest extent. For example, in the logical reasoning section, individuals that scored in the 12th percentile believed that their general reasoning abilities fell at the 68th percentile, and that their overall scores would be in the 62nd percentile. The authors point out that the problem was not primarily underestimating how others had done; those in the bottom quartile overestimated the number of their correct answers by nearly 50 percent. Similarly, after seeing the answers of the best performers -- those in the top quartile -- those in the bottom quartile continued to believe that they had performed well.

The converse also bears repeating. Despite the fact that students in the top quartile fairly accurately estimated how well they did, they also tended to overestimate the performance of others. In short, smart people tend to believe that everyone else "gets it." Incompetent people display both an increasing tendency to overestimate their cognitive abilities and a belief that they are smarter than the majority of those demonstrably sharper.

Boy does this shed light on the challenges of teaching! I assume ol' Socrates was right: You can't teach what you don't know. So here we instructors are (and assuming we conform to the study's findings) "getting it" and assuming others do as well, while many of those who don't get it — our students — think they do even in the face of evidence to the contrary. And the less competent the student is, the more likely they are to exaggerate their competence.

So: Is the enterprise of teaching doomed?