Socrative (UKPSF A4 K4)

It is very popular in physics education circles to use "clickers" to allow the students do simple quizzes in the class. For example this is the method advocated by Eric Mazur. The idea is to do active engagement of the students with the material.

One issue is just how to actually use clickers in the classroom. It would be better to actually hand out the clickers, but they are quite expensive. In the mathematical sciences department at Plymouth, we give each student a clicker, but in service courses for other departments, the students typically don't have access to clickers.

One possible option would be to get the students to use  a smart phone or tablet, rather than an expensive clicker. There is website called socrative , which allows tests to be taken by studemts on
mobile device. A couple of years ago I made a presentation on using socrative at a HEA workshop.

I have not actually used Socrative in a classroom setting. One issue was whether the wireless signal would be strong enough for a class of students all using mobile devices. Also, it has to be remembered that not all students will have access to a smart device.

Now that the standard lecture length is two hours at Plymouth, I should think about using socrative again.

laziness and student engagement (UKPSF A4 V4)

I have just finished reading

Enhancing Learning And Teaching In Higher Education: Engaging With The Dimensions Of Practice  by John Lea

This is not a book I would read for pleasure. I mostly read it to help me pass my second attempt at passing the PGCAP exam.  The book was probably the best one I have read in which was written in

PGCAP style, but many things in the book annoyed me. Unlike other books, written by people who

believe the PGCAP world view, there were a few useful ideas in it.

One section annoyed me. The author wanted to show that the number of undergraduate students has grown by a huge amount. Rather, then the authors finding the information out, they proposed that the reader as an exercise should find it out and they subtly hinted that Wikipedia should be consulted. One od the reasons, I buy books is so that I am not reliant on Wikipedia. I can see that the author, thought that, this exercise of collecting student number in Universities as a function of time, would engage the readers. I just felt the author was being lazy. If they wrote the chapter, they should have found out the information and perhaps created a good graph.

This is one of the problems with some of the ideas of pushing more of the work to the students. Sometimes it makes the module leader lazy.

Multiple choice (UKPSF K3 K4 V3)

It has been a very long time since I was at School, but I can dimly remember doing some exams which were assessed with multiple-choice questions.  I didn't really like them. I think, I found it confusing to try and understand the wordings of the questions. I don't remember that much of the exams at Imperial College, when I was an undergraduate there, but I don't think that there were many multiple choice questions.

So I have always been a bit biased against multiple choice questions, versus free answers. In Physics and Mathematics assessments, we very rarely ask the student to write essays. In the course I inherited, there were multiple choice questions, but these were mostly for numerical answers to calculations.

On issue within multiple choice questions is what happens when students guess between the typically four possible choices. I have been to a talk, by a person from the medical school, where they gave students -1/4 if they got an answer wrong.  The famous SAT test in the USA, also uses a system where 1/4 is subtracted for an incorrect answer. I have not had time to study it, but there are statistical tests, to try and discover, where a student is just guessing.

More interestingly, there are banks of multiple choice questions called concept inventories. The teaching method for maths and physics is to show some theory, then work some examples. The students then attempt to solve additional problems.  What has been found is the students focus too much on  the problem solving and don't attempt to master  the underlying physics or theory. So banks of multiple choice questions have been designed to test a student's knowledge without any calculation. The physics education community have also carefully studied student's misconceptions of physics and thus the questions are designed to contain common incorrect answers.

So perhaps I should revise my dislike of multiple-choice questions.

Of course, if you think that knowledge has nothing to do with learning, then you will not want to use multiple choice methods, and just rely on the students writing their opinions in an essay.

Moodle training session (UKPSF K4)

Today I attended a two hour training session on Moodle quizzes run by our Dominic: in our department.

Some of the points to remember:

• It is best to use the Moodle question bank to develop questions.
• The quizzes are made from questions in the question bank. 
• The questions can be put into categories.
• Make sure to click the hidden button on a quiz to ensure that the students don't see it.
• We did an experiment of exporting/importing a quiz.
• Dominic recommended that we don't use the upload to Universities central store of marks. This is technically possible.
• Dominic mentioned respondus as a way to convert questions in different formats.
• The system for making random variables seems complicated. Somehow Moodle generates a certain number of random numbers, which can then be used in the questions. There were issues in decimal points.
• There is no student ID in Moodle so the student ID is not included in the comma separated list, so this may make it hard to upload marks to S3.  A perl script would have to be written.  

Physics Education Research: Investigations and Applications (UKPSF K1 K2 K3)

On Friday, I am going to an event organized by the IOP on teaching undergraduate physics.

The abstract for the meeting reads

Physics Education Research (PER) consists of investigations into teaching and learning specifically within the physics context. This one-day meeting focuses on PER, both in terms of conducting educational research and also applying its findings. It will be of interest to those seeking to conduct investigations of their own, and also to those who wish to apply evidence-based findings in their own teaching. The event will consist of a mix of presentation, workshop and panel sessions, and should provide an opportunity for Continuing Professional Development.

I am not planning on doing research into teaching physics, but I am interested in the results. One key issue is the incorrect physical models that students have of even Newtonian physics, which they ave direct physical experience.

It will be interesting to see whether they use any cognitive theory.

Communication -- making the effort (UKPSF V4 A5 )

As part of my research, I do know a lot of jargon about nuclear physics and computing. When I speak
to non-experts i do make an attempt to not assume that the person I am talking to knows my jargon.
When I was a graduate students at Edinburgh, we once got a new supercomputer. A Proffesor in another research group, asked me how fast the new machine was. I told him, it could calculate 10 propagators a night, which he didn't understand.

It is in important is software project that the developers learn how to speak to the clients, so that they produce useful software.

It is particularly important to try and get the language correct, when talking to students, who are just starting on their journey to becoming experts. When I taught statistics to engineers I did try to add lots of engineering examples.

I came across a blog post about a succesful essay submission for part of their PGCAP course. I can see why the PGCAP people who marked it like it. They probably come from a sociology background, so they are happy to see a discussion of teaching in terms of the French philosopher Foucault. He didn't read Focault for his PGCAP course, and probably he had learned about it from a course he took as an undergraduate. There are a couple of references to PGCAP sources, but it is not clear that he had read them. So essentially he was passed, because he shared the cultural references of the  PGCAP markers, rather for any attempt to learn their teaching methods.

I might add that it looks as though the guy, who wrote the blog post is a good teacher.

Of course, those of us, who have decided that postmodernism is  rubbish, are at a disadvantage. So, as a student is expected to learn a new set of jargon, but the teachers don't want to bother.

Maths reform strikes back. (UKPSF V4 K3 V3 V4)

I don't normally watch daytime TV. However, two weeks ago,  I was watching some magazine program. One of the stories involved some American professor (Jo Boaler),  who was writing press releases to stop  children being tested on the basic times table. The presenters seemed to think that children should memorize the times table, but they were not sure why.

I have started reading the book  by Jo Boaler, called 

Mathematical Mindsets: Unleashing Students' Potential through Creative Math, Inspiring Messages and Innovative Teaching.

I have only read the first chapter, but she is advocating "project based" learning. She was also complaining about the state of maths education in California. However, that was the state where there had been a big reform movement of mathematics teaching. There is a history of attempts to reform mathematics written from the perspective a Professor who was against the type of reforms. The issue is whether students are ready for problem solving, if they don't have the  background in basic mathematical techniques, such as algebra. The reform movement was stopped in California, and teachers started back on traditional methods.

Given the large consequences of any proposed reforms, I think it is useful to study previous attempts to reform education,  to see what went wrong. It will be interesting to see whether Prof. Jo Boaler mentions the history of mathematics reform in California.