Monthly Archive for July, 2008

Insights on Fanny & Freddie

Published on July 25, 2008 in Blogging as a Teaching and Research Tool, Economics and What is Education?. 2 Comments

This post interests me on several levels: the connected nature of media today; contemporary economic issues, specifically the difficulties being faced by Fanny Mae & Freddie Mac due to the mortgage market meltdown; and the issue of the market system & the social good.

I subscribe via rss to a number of news feeds, including the editorials of the Wall Street Journal. Due to the magic of my feed reader, each morning, with very little effort I can get up to date on the news of the last 24 hours from a variety of perspectives. This is very useful for a teacher of the social sciences. This morning I discovered an article in the Notable & Quotable column of the Journal, which gives a brief snippet of something clever. The article today turned out to be a blog post by Lawrence Summers, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and former President of Harvard University. The post was one of the clearest and most thoughtful interpretations I have seen of the current problems of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, the government sponsored mortgage market players. After reading the post, I followed it back to the source, and discovered another nugget: a new blog called Creative Capitalism: A Conversation, which describes itself as:

a web experiment designed to produce a book — a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development — to be edited by us and published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008. The book takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In it, he said that many of the world’s problems are too big for philanthropy–even on the scale of the Gates Foundation. And he said that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them.

This is the public blog of a private website where a group of invited economists have spent the past couple of weeks criticizing and debating those claims.

How cool is this? One might even call this a form of scholarly activity. ;-)

The premise of Gates’ speech was that the power of the market system can and should be applied to solving the substantive problems associated with economic development, from educating women to erradicating disease to developing effective financial systems. Can the market system, which is predicated on personal gain, be effectively used for the social good? Check out this blog to find out.

More on metacognition and assessment

Published on July 24, 2008 in The Experiment. 2 Comments

For a couple of years now, I’ve tried to build low stakes, formative assessment into my intro courses. The intent was to help students become more responsible for their own learning and promote more mid-course adjustments to study strategies while there was still plenty of time for that. (Contrast this approach with the mid-term, final exam model.) The way I implemented this metacognitive effort was to encourage students to take the online quizzes provided by the text book publisher at the end of each chapter. As long as students took the quizzes, I gave them extra credit regardless of how well they did. And, to judge by their scores, nearly everyone did well. When individuals did very poorly, which was rare, I spoke to them publicly about whether they had taken the quiz seriously or just for the credit. The message was received and the students almost always did substantially better next time.

Unfortunately, the plan didn’t work as well as I had hoped. In past years I found that the assessment quizzes, based on textbook test banks, didn’t correspond well to my exam questions. The quizzes were not very challenging and thus not adequate preparation for my exams. Students could do well on the quizzes and then not so well on the exams. I felt like the lack of correlation between quiz and exam questions defeated the purpose of the exercise and encouraged students to think of the former as busy work, unrelated to assessing their mastery of the material.

This past semester, to address this concern, I adopted the Aplia product, customized for the text I was using. I made this selection principally because of the higher quality of their quiz (problem set) questions compared with textbook test banks. The result was disconcerting. Student scores on the quizzes, were low, and as the semester went on they got worse. After about the fourth week, the class mean never reached 70%. I got the feeling that students were not taking the quizzes seriously, that they were just going through the motions. Economics suggests that people behave rationally, predicting that students would merely make an effort to get the credit, while not taking the assessment seriously. And yet this seemed to conflict with my experience in past semesters when the students did consistently well on the quizzes.

To examine this paradox, I added a question to the final exam, which I told students I wouldn’t look at until after grades were in. The question asked:

The average score on the Aplia problem sets was pretty low. How did you approach them?
a. I tried to do my best, but the problems were difficult; when I did badly on the problem sets, I took that at as a sign that I hadn’t mastered the material. (11%)
b. I tried to do my best, but the problems were unlike the ones we did in class. (32%)
c. I tried to get the right answer but it didn’t bother me when I got the questions wrong. (41%)
d. I didn’t take the problems too seriously; I was just trying to get the points for trying. (16%)

I intended ‘a’ to be the right answer, the answer which indicated that the exercise was achieving its goal. Answer ‘b’ was included to reflect the fact that mid-way through the semester, many quizzes began to include numerical questions, which usually were based on methods of solution that I didn’t emphasize in the course. The advantage of numerical questions is that they result in “exact” answers. The problem is that often numerical questions are driven by the need to keep the math simple, which requires the economics to be trivial or an unusual case.

The frequency distribution of the responses is given in parentheses. Thinking about the likely bias in the responses this suggests to me that probably 60% of the students didn’t take the quizzes seriously, which is a problem.

What I’ve decided to do is raise the bar a bit. For this coming semester, I will give credit for the quizzes as long as the score is 70% or more. We’ll see if that makes it more of a useful assessment while still keeping the stakes low.

Naming the Teaching Center

Published on July 14, 2008 in Teaching and Learning and UMW Teaching Center. 5 Comments

We need to come up with an appropriate name for the UMW Teaching Center. Ernie, the Chair of the Teaching Center Advisory Committee, points out that most teaching centers have similar and not very catchy names. Does the name matter? I think it does.

In my view, the concept of a teaching center suffers from several automatic problems. The first is that, especially at a school like Mary Washington, we all know how to teach. The second follows from the first, that almost by definition, a teaching center is remedial in nature, that it’s where instructors go to fix problems in their teaching. The third is that teaching isn’t serious intellectual activity like the scholarship we do in our disciplines. I suspect we all know colleagues who never participated in a TIP activity because of these reasons. I also believe that these problems are false, or at least misleading.

I think that teaching (or more precisely, thinking about teaching) should be construed as serious intellectual activity. That’s not to say that all teaching is necessarily serious intellectual activity. We all know colleagues who have merely gone through the motions. Suppose we replace the word ‘teaching’ in the previous paragraph with the word ‘research’. Would we criticize a research center because everyone knows how to do research? Would we think of a research center as remedial? A research center is a place to go (think sabbatical) to enable us to put time and effort into improving our research. It’s a place we go to get access to sources or data we don’t have in our normal professional lives. Suppose you needed to learn Latin or SAS to complete a research project. Lack of those facilities is “a problem,” but we wouldn’t think of learning Latin or SAS as a negative thing. Rather, it is just what we need to do to get the project done. Our teaching center should be perceived in the same way, and I think the right name can point in that direction.

In a previous blog post I said,

The mission of the teaching center should be advocacy of a culture of teaching innovation at the university. … [The] Center shouldn’t be conceived primarily as a department offering programs, but rather as a focus for building and nurturing intellectual community on teaching and learning in higher education.

It is for these reasons that I recommend a title like “The UMW Center for Teaching Inquiry”. I think that such a title would help people understand that the Center is not about something that can be easily put into a box and dismissed, but rather something more serious and open-ended: intellectual inquiry into teaching and learning.

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