I was entering the second midterm exam grades into my grade book and looking at how students performed relative to their first exam. If they substantially improved or worsened I looked to see if they had been doing the meta activities or not. There appeared to be some patterns but they weren’t straightforward. Admittedly, scanning by eye is unable to control for outside factors, but it occurred to me that I should probably look for interaction effects as well as straightforward effects of the meta activities. Something to keep in mind.
Monthly Archive for November, 2005
My colleague, Bob Rycroft, is really generous with his time. For years he has graciously agreed to guest lecture in my research methodology course, giving my students a hands-on introduction to eViews, the statistical software we use. Bob is our econometric guru, so it makes sense in terms of comparative advantage for him to give this introduction. (Okay, also it lets me off the hook.)
This year we ran into a problem–Bob teaches a course at the same time as mine so it looked like I was going to have to do the introduction myself. Into the breach stepped Jerry Slezak, our instructional technology specialist, who had turned Bob on to Macromedia Captivate. Jerry is our go-to guy whenever we have an impossible problem like trying to be in two places at once.
As a result, Bob came back to me and said, “you know I have been thinking about making a movie with Captivate. This would be an opportunity to try it out.” So Jerry and Bob got together and made the movie, which you can view at http://www.jerryslezak.net/eviews/
I played the movie today and it worked very well. I projected the movie overhead, while the students followed along working on computers in teams. I paused the movie at various points to allow the students to catch up (e.g. when they were doing the data entry) or to make a point myself. We finished the movie just before the end of class. For homework, I asked students to think about what questions they have about eViews, that weren’t answered in the movie, especially for doing their own statistical analyses. Anything I can’t answer I will take back to the guru.
This illustrates one way that IT may be able to enhance teaching and learning–by automating lower level processes to allow experts to spend more time on higher level ones. A further advantage is that students can view the movie again as many times as they desire at their leisure, something they couldn’t do in past years.
Our school has a requirement that students take a couple of courses that require public speaking. My research methodology course satisfies that requirement, which makes sense since presenting research results is a natural product of the research process. My course includes two formal speaking requirements as well numerous informal opportunities. The first formal event is a 2 to 4 minute oral presentation summarizing their research proposal. The second event is the presentation at the end of the semester of each student’s research results, similar to a conference presentation.
Students do pretty well on the latter, but have always done fairly poorly on the former. Some students have said little more than “This is my topic. The End.” Part of the problem is no doubt that the students don’t yet have a clear idea of what their project entails. Remember, for most this is the first serious research project in economics they’ve ever attempted.
Anyway, last summer I attended a workshop put on by our SI program where we discussed problems we were having with speaking assignments. What came out of the workshop was an idea that worked very well for my students–it was suggested that I make the literature review the focus of their short presentation. This is something the students understand at this point. So the assignment was framed as “Explain your proposal from the point of view of what is the niche it attempts to fill in the existing literature.” Most students spent a minute or two discussing the literature on their research topic, and then were able to clearly explain and justify what they intended to do for their research.
In short, the short presentations were the best I ever experienced. No one did what I would consider to be a poor job, even those students who showed nervousness.
Okay, I am deep in the trenches where it’s hard to recall the big picture of this experiment, so bear that in mind as you process what I’m about to say.
I just finished two days of lecturing on the income-expenditure model of GDP. This is the basic model of the macro economy that my students will learn this semester. (N.B. to Economists: Yes, I know this model is “old” and out of fashion, but it is the simplest and easiest model which allows students to address all the macro issues (including inflation) they need to in my course. And it is covered in an appendix in the Sexton text which I’m using.) As an analytical topic, this one needs a bit of lecturing on my part to make sure the students get it.
I was struck by two thoughts today. In the early class, I was reminded that lecturing on a topic I know and like is fun. It fact, it is much easier for me to lecture than to manage a class discussion, making sure that everyone who wishes has an opportunity to speak, and making sure that the points I think students need to consider get addressed. I also remembered that lecture can be an efficient way to get material across in a limited period of time. There’s not much that students need to reflect on at this stage. They just need to learn the mechanics of the model.
In the later class, I had a less attractive thought. Maybe I was tired; maybe it was the character of that group, or maybe it was that the second class meets in a dismal, dark hole of a classroom. But what struck me was that the dynamics of the class session were so different from what I’ve been experiencing this semester. In general, the students had their heads down as they struggled to take notes. They looked a bit like athletes near the end of a long race. The questions they raised almost exclusively asked me to repeat a point I’d just made. It seemed to me that there was little if any thinking going on–hopefully, that will come later as they review and reflect on their notes (the commentator asks uncertainly)?
Anyway it really struck me as different, almost retro, when compared with most of the class sessions we’ve had this semester. It was even different from the previous lectures I’d done on the theories of supply and demand. Why? Perhaps it’s because the income-expenditure model requires more background before students can actually work with the model. Or it’s because the text does a fine job of explaining supply and demand, while income-expenditure is relegated to an appendix. More to think about.
This was a really good week, I think. Monday we did the data analysis exercise I’ve previously described. Wednesday we had a really excellent discussion on the nature of government.
In the past I asked students to spend an hour thinking about government and then from that reflection to write an essay of no more than 100 words to summarize their thinking. This has always been a good assignment, since the word limit forced students to think carefully about what they should include in their 100 words. This year I asked students to prepare for the discussion by doing the reflection and I suggested they might want to write notes though I didn’t require them to write a formal essay. I told them that for the first 10 minutes of class on Wednesday I would ask them to write a summary of their thinking. Wednesday in class after the initial 10 minutes, I asked students to give me a one sentence definition of government. I wrote a sample of those sentences down and they prompted a subsequent discussion. The discussion went really well. For whatever reason, the majority of the students defined government as I hoped they would: in the abstract. Only a handful defined government in terms of the institutions of U.S. government. Most did implicitly assume a democracy, but that wasn’t critical to their definitions. The collective view was that government was a cooperative arrangement among people to give up some rights in return for protection and other benefits. This definition provided a jumping off point to introduce the role of government in the economy.
The discussion induced a few students (political science majors?) to participate who hadn’t spoken up much in the past.
Friday was another hands-on exercise. I distributed a copy of Table B-81 from the 2005 Economic Report of the President, which is a summary of the U.S. Federal Budget. I asked pairs of students to analyze the table and identify the major categories of spending. I asked them to identify the following budget shares:
* National Defense
* Welfare
* Social Security
* Healthcare
* Education
I pointed out that there was more to this than simply taking the line entries for each category since more than one line entry could legitimately be counted in each category.
I also asked them to identify the “other” major expenditure category (Interest on the public debt).
Then I asked them to figure out the budget shares for transfers to the poor and transfers to the elderly.
They didn’t have quite enough time to finish the assignment, so I asked them to complete their analysis over the weekend and prepare to report back to the class Monday.
N.B. (Monday): The students made several observations when we discussed the results today:
* How most of the federal falls into only five categories (defense, welfare, social security, healthcare and debt service);
* How little the federal government spends on education;
* How much of the federal budget is transfers.
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