Author: bpsutliff

I found the article ” What a Controversy Over an App Tells Us About How Students Learn Now” on the Chronicle of Higher Ed. This piece focuses on a university case where students were accused of cheating for using the app Quizlet to study for an exam. For those that aren’t familiar, Quizlet allows users to upload questions and answers in a flashcards style for people to study. The idea is that if you have a big exam, instead of writing down all the flashcards and inevitably dropping them a few times during transport, you can swipe through these ones online. There are often times when there are questions that you would have missed when making your own cards, and it can be really great to see what others think is important to study. I believe the site Koofers has a similar functionality and is more common here at VT. The argument made against both Quizlet and Koofers is that people can upload test questions that are currently being used by professors, so students on these sites are effectively seeing exams ahead of time.

Some professors/institutes have reacted by trying to ban the use of such resources by their classes. I know I have seen at least two syllabi here that have specifically denounced the use of Koofers at VT. What’s interesting here is that there is no way, short of restricted internet usage, for universities to enforce this. They are relying on students’ honesty to not use the resources online. But the students who would follow such guidelines are also the ones that are less likely to try to cheat anyway.

I have always taken issue with this stance. We live in a connected global society with all the resources of the world effectively at our fingertips. One quote from the article that reminds me far too much of middle school:

“Robin DeRosa, an interdisciplinary-studies professor at Plymouth State University, used to motivate her students to learn math by warning them that they wouldn’t always have a calculator available. But with smart phones in their pockets now, students rarely encounter such constraints.”

If I’m working in the lab, it may be faster to do the math in my head, but if I’m really in doubt, I will almost always have my phone nearby to reassure me. There will be few times when I can’t google some basic facts online. If I need to know how Infrared Spectroscopy works, I’m about a 5 min YouTube video away from understanding it better than most students who just learned about it for a week of class. To try to pretend students won’t have this access when faced with “real-world” problems is short-sighted.  Students should learn to access these resources, not ignore them.

“It’s about authentic demonstrations that are externally facing so students can be part of this data-rich environment,” [Natasha Jankowski, director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment] said, “and about how we’re helping each other collectively to move us from a ‘gotcha’ assessment to creating a developmental learning experience. It’s a different teaching-learning mentality.”

An argument can be made that I have an unfair advantage over someone who doesn’t know about Quizlet or Koofers, but that could be solved by introducing students to the item as a learning tool. If everyone has access and knowledge of the same tools, there’s no unfair advantage. However, I would argue in today’s society, we all have roughly equal access (at least at a given institution), and the real learning skill is to find and evaluate information based on those resources.  No one is going to ban Yahoo Answers (is this even still a thing?) but most people aren’t going to trust it over other sources like Wikipedia, a textbook, or journal article. If you go to Yahoo over the others, that’s your choice, and probably your failure to learn from. Just because I’m scoffing at it, doesn’t mean the person who uses it has an advantage over me, I accept that I’m using a different toolset and would not ask theirs to be limited.

“There are times when students do need to know factual information, fundamental knowledge from a given field, etc.,” she said in an email. “But how do we assess their understanding of that knowledge? If the answer is a multiple choice and/or fill-in-the-blank exam, how much does it matter that students can recall that knowledge offhand?”

In class this past week, someone mentioned Walter Lewin, a renowned MIT astrophysicists known for giving tremendous lectures. The description reminded of Richard Feynman, another physicist known for tremendous teaching chops. Both of these professors are well renowned and honored for successfully communicating science to broad audiences and making tremendous discoveries. Feynman was famous for the Manhattan Project (atomic bomb) and his Nobel Prize. Lewin discovered rotating neutron stars with balloons. Both men were clearly brilliant in their own right and provided tremendous insight into the scientific world in ways most lecturers could not.

Here’s the problem though: both have also had some serious claims of sexual harassment and sexist behavior. In “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” there is a chapter dedicated to Feynman recounting how he literally TRAINED himself to disrespect women so he could sleep with them. The best summary of this that I’ve seen is here, on the blog Restructure!. Which to quote a quote:

Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.

That’s Feynman’s own words, in what’s basically an autobiography. Not the best look.

Similarly, Lewin was accused of sexual harassment through his online courses, and MIT took away his emeritus status and took down his lectures. I can’t find much info on what he actually did, but that hardly matters. He was a brilliant man that preyed on women.

In a similar vein, James Watson of DNA-fame has also displayed horribly racist and demeaning things. The man is brilliant for helping discover DNA and for helping found the human genome project and such, but even his disrespect for Rosalind Franklin and her research which he stole shows a poor attitude.

My question is: should we revere these men? Should we use their lectures and their notes to teach? 

On the one hand, they’ve still made valuable discoveries and have revealed tremendous methods of teaching. They still have the potential to teach many generations and inspire awe in countless future scientists. On the other, they’ve held some pretty shady views that muck up their legacies. Placing them on a pedestal also places their misdeeds on that same pedestal. This seems like a dangerous game; we don’t want to encourage more bigotry in science and education. But again, they were amazing at providing explanations in ways that people could understand complex ideas. It would be a tragedy to lose that. Do we use their teaching examples and point out their imperfections to say “you can be better”? I don’t know. I hate to waste a brilliant idea, but I’d also hate to encourage any form of bigotry and discrimination.

What are your thoughts? Did you know about these case? Do you know about others? If anyone has examples of the opposite, of brilliant minds that defended minorities or stood up against harassment, please share them.

Today, while waiting to meet with my PI,  I was reading this article about students needing to feel like they can succeed in assignments if they are going to actually be engaged in classes and learning. In short, if students don’t feel like their effort gets them anywhere or doesn’t provide the desired outcomes then they’ll quickly lose interest in the course. They might drop the course or stop trying to do well.

This article was perfectly timed because my meeting included me asking to drop a course that was consuming far too much of my time.  I read through the article thinking “yup…yup…that’s me!” as I related much of the content to what was happening in my class.

The class is something I’m very interested in, computational modeling, but I have very little experience with the material. I took this class as an intro, to learn some of the basics, which the professor teaches rather well. However, his assignments assume far more knowledge and skill than he is willing to teach. I found myself spending countless hours trying to convert his abstract and compacted notation into usable computer code to do his assignments. It only took 3 homework assignments in 3 weeks to push me over the edge. I had lost so much sleep, all three of those weekends, and was behind on research goals, all from one class. Even the two assignments I did finish, I was not confident in the answers I handed in.

The article was funny because the author discussed how it can be easy to know what it takes to be a professional athlete, but that doesn’t make it any easier to actually become a pro.  This is what I was feeling with these assignments. I knew what I needed to do. The professor was good at teaching that. But the actual execution, the how, was far out of my grasp. It’s easy to say an IronMan just requires swimming, biking, and running. I can do all three of those easily, it’s the full bit of HOW you do them. I can’t swim 2.4mi and then bike 112mi, and THEN run a marathon. My professor was essentially just saying “go do an Ironman, it just involves some simple swimming, biking, and running, it should be easy.”  I think I’ll pass…

So after a rough weekend, I gave up, just as the article predicted.  I decided the effort wasn’t worth my time. I can learn the same content on my own, sans grading. I can take my own pace and still get sleep.

This concept seems critical to higher education delivering on its purpose to grow and disseminate knowledge. A lot of courses, especially those in fields like pre-med or pre-law like to weed students out because of the high incoming demand for those degrees. The concept of attainable successes can help weed out students I suppose, by guaranteeing that assignments are so difficult that almost no one can completely succeed. That’ll quickly squash any motivation for those subjects! But I think that’s the opposite of what should be done. Professors and other educators should keep in mind what students can reasonably learn in a given amount of time, and make sure to reinforce it and provide opportunities for successes, both large and small.  This builds confidence, and probably continued curiousity in a subject. Those two things are critical to discovery in my book.