A couple weeks ago I mentioned introducing Gardner’s APGAR assessment to my First Year Seminar students. My students subsequently corrected my math, much as Gardner suggested in his comment to my post: The average APGAR for the class turned out to be 50%, not the 10% I indicated earlier. Fortunately, this didn’t change the conclusion: the students weren’t adequately prepared for class.
Next year I hope to try the APGAR on a regular basis.
Read the recent blog posting of Emily in my research methods course. Her post also gives a pretty good idea of what the endgame in an economics research project is like.
One of the topics I became interested in when I wrote my book was critical reading; in fact, the chapter on critical reading is one that I’m particularly proud of.
In a recent post, Will Richardson raised the question of whether or not reading is dead from the perspective of young people today. Both Will’s post and the associated comments are worth reading.
One issue that worries me, and that was only briefly touched on in the discussion, is whether or not students today have the ability to read deeply.
In one of the comments to Will’s post, Kyle says
Reading is also changing. Reading is no longer a linear experience, where one reads one page after another. Reading now, especially on the Internet, is a three dimensional experience. The depth and breadth of content grows geometrically as multiple hyperlinks give readers the ability to dig into the background information that the author used to formulate their thoughts.
Okay, at least in principle I agree. But very little of what I’ve read in Web2.0 (e.g. blog postings, wiki articles, etc) is very deep. Many of the ideas are complex, but their explication tends to be in snippets, rather than in more fully developed compositions.
I don’t have an answer to this question. I know I found reading complex texts difficult when I was in college, perhaps as difficult as students today seem to find it. However, I don’t remember my contemporaries complaining about the difficulties that current students do. Today’s student’s strike me as impatient, or undisciplined. I may be wrong though. It could be just they way they’re articulating the same issues that we faced.
The new address is http://stevegreenlaw.org/pedablogy. (You can still reach it at the old address.)
Tomorrow I’m heading down to Charleston, SC to attend the annual meetings of the Southern Economics Association. I will be participating (with KimMarie McGoldrick) in a panel discussion on supervising undergraduate research in economics. KimMarie and I conducted a survey of undergraduate research practices among subscribers to the tch-econ newsgroup. We’ve put a summary of the results into a powerpoint presentation, which you can see here.
Another thing I did in the First Year Seminar on Tuesday was to show them Gardner’s APGAR post. I asked the students to answer the questions for themselves. I had set up a spreadsheet on the classroom computer and asked students to come up and key in their responses one at a time.
I was very pleased (and more than a little surprised) that they seemed to take this seriously. No one laughed or otherwise indicated that they thought the questions out of the realm of reason. Out of 10 possible points, the class average score was 1.0, with the individual student scores ranging from 0.6 to 1.6. I pointed out that this was essentially a measure of their preparation for class. They inferred that 10% was a failing grade, and several students mentioned that they hadn’t been able to keep up with the work as much as they would like to recently. They seemed sincere and contrite, not at all like students in my other classes when asked similar questions.
Interestingly enough, as I was preparing for this class over the last 24 hours, I felt pressure to do a complete job as I imagined being asked to answer the APGAR questions myself.
We’ll have to try this again on a regular basis and see what comes of it. Thanks Gardner!
I spent a fair amount of time last weekend thinking about what went wrong in the first year seminar on Thursday. I didn’t realize until today that I was looking too far afield.
My first thought was to be disappointed in my students. Why had none of them done what I requested? Upon reflection, I decided that such thoughts were pointless. Whatever the reason, they didn’t get it. The question was how to make it right.
For Tuesday’s class I planned to model for the students what I hoped they had done during Thursday’s session. I began by explaining that on Thursday, I had wanted them to develop questions to elaborate on the presentation I was giving, and to post those questions in real time on the class’ chat box. It was at this point that the students blurted out that they had no idea I had wanted them to post the questions. Apparently, in my efforts to juggle all the balls I had planned for Thursday’s session, I had forgotten to mention this element to the students. (Martha, who was present in class on Thursday, confirmed this for me later today.)
To say that I felt bad is an understatement. We proceeded to have a very good class Tuesday. I asked the students to develop the questions; their list was essentially the same as mine. Martha’s very helpful post yesterday gave me the idea of asking students to “google jockey” for answers to these questions. I asked three students to do so while the rest developed the remainder of the questions. As the jockies discovered an answer, they would stop our discussion and call it out, as well as providing source information. I wrote the answers down on the board next to the questions. By the end of class, we had found answers for all the questions about the U.S. textile industry. I asked the students to develop similar answers for China’s textile industry for next class. You can see the responses to date here.
The other week, I blogged about my students backchanneling during my class via IM. Martha suggested we try to formalize that arrangement on the course website. She and Jerry (or was it Jerry and she?) installed a chat box on the course homepage which you can see on the right hand side.
I planned an exercise in class that I hoped would exploit the chat box. I have been modeling the process an economist might use to do a research project, in the form of the project I am currently doing in parallel with the projects my students are doing this semester.
Today I planned to demonstrate how an economist uses economic theory to derive insights about a research question. To that end, I presented a fairly simple, but theoretical analysis of the effects of outsourcing on labor markets in the U.S. and China. I told students that I would give them my notes, so in lieu of writing down what I was presenting, I wanted them to think of questions the answers to which would give a richer understanding of the issues being discussed. As examples, I suggested they could ask how many U.S. jobs have been outsourced or how low Chinese wages are. I concluded by asking that each student try to post at least one question.
This turned out to be a complete bust. After class, I looked at the chat box. The students had been chatting all right, but not a single student had posted a question of the type I was looking for. Did they not understand what I was asking them to do? Did the public nature of the forum, where they could see what the others were posting, create negative spillovers in that since no one was posting questions, individuals felt comfortable not posting themselves? Something to ponder.
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