One of the new frontiers in economics is Behavioral Economics, for which Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith won the Nobel Prize in 2002.
Here’s a thoughtful and funny video which describes behavioral economics in contrast to the more traditional neoclassical paradigm. What does it remind you of?
I’ve been nearly silent in this space this semester. I went six weeks without a post, though in truth, it feels longer than that. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to blog, but in January I was feeling totally buried in my work. I chose to hunker-down, first subconsciously, and then consciously, with my teaching and the FSEM planning.
I am teaching three courses that I love. Having a reduced course load really does enable one to do a better job with the remaining courses. I hope to be able to blog more regularly during the second half of the term.
Shannon has another stunning post that I really want to see students respond to. But I don’t just want the usual suspects. That’s why I’m going to send a challenge to my first year advising group and see if they’ll rise to the challenge.
When you teach an elective course, you can pretty much teach it as you like. The content and pedagogical approach are up to you.
When you teach a required course or a prerequisite, you are expected to meet or at least consider the expectations of others, your department in the case of a major requirement, and the faculty at large when you teach a general education course. Of course, the extent to which instructors respect this expectation varies, since it conflicts with another strong cultural belief, namely academic freedom.
How does this apply to FSEMs? I think it means the faculty and staff who care about the FSEM program, including all the instructors, need to participate in the conversation to define the vision. That’s what I was trying to promote with the last post. One of the things I’ve found interesting over the three years that we’ve been developing this program is the variety of opinions on this question. Part of this reflects the different places that we’re coming from: administrators who are focussed on issues of student satisfaction, retention, etc., faculty who want to induct students into the life of the mind they themselves are pursuing. But another part reflects the fact that this is a complex and difficult question. One of the advantages of participating since the beginning is that my view has become clearer. That doesn’t make it the right view, but it does mean I have a better idea of what I think that view is.
I don’t think we all need to have exactly the same view of what the FSEM is about (given the culture of academia, that would be highly unlikely), but I do think we can all learn from the conversation. There’s always going to be a tension between what I want to accomplish in my class and what the collective goals are. That’s okay. I feel strongly that the conversation alone should generate a common structure to the program, that is, if all the instructors participate. I also think that instructors who do not participate may be saying that they don’t accept a common structure. And I think that’s wrong.
I’ve spent some time reviewing the acclaimed First Year Experience program at the University of South Carolina. One thing that I think I know is that their program is substantially different from ours. It’s certainly broader, encompassing issues that involve first year advising, and remedial (for lack of a better term) learning to bring students up to the college level. Our program is designed to be more academic or intellectual in approach.
Shannon recently described what we are up against:
Lets be honest the University is competing for student’s attention and it is really an unbalanced fight. For freshman that are getting their first taste of freedom away from parents and the identity they have been living with most of their lives, it is a time to explore new ideas. There are also friends, clubs, parties, etc. Academics are going to take a back seat to these things most of the time. Combine this with the anti-school sentiment and it is plain to see that for most students being a student isn’t really the most important thing. And here is what I am really getting at, when there is no community built around learning, students will not be interested. I don’t believe cool tools or awesome professors could fully convince someone of the importance of learning. It would just be a blip on the radar screen in a sea of tradition, non-controversial, and rote schooling.
Some may discount this as only a description of students who aren’t serious about their education. Yes, but I also think it’s a dead-on description of the majority of our students. The FSEM program may be one way to address this disconnect between academia’s view of higher education and the typical undergraduate view. One thing is for sure: our FSEM won’t be successful if it doesn’t.
For a couple of years, I’ve written about our institution’s pilot program to offer first year seminars.
We have now made it a requirement as part of our general education curriculum. It’s not clear, though, that all our faculty really understand what the FSEM program is about. What I’ve witnessed is that even professors with decades of experience don’t really comprehend the program until they try teaching a course in it. Teaching a seminar-style course to first year students, where the emphasis in the course is on inquiry, rather than presentation or even exploration of a settled body of knowledge is quite different from either an upper-level seminar or a traditionally introductory course which enrolls first year students. The fundamental purpose of the FSEMs is not to teach content, but rather to introduce students to the life of the mind. At one level this has developed as an emphasis on teaching skills, but what we’re really to articulate is something more holistic, not skills per se, but rather a model of the process of intellectual inquiry, the art or culture of the intellectual life.
A group of us are developing a summer workshop for FSEM instructors. In the past, we’ve had a one day (6 hour) workshop organized along skill lines, with sessions on writing, speaking, research skills and technology tools. This year we’re making it two full days.
Yesterday we had what may prove to be an epiphany. Instead of a skills-orientation, we’re going to try to organize the sessions in terms of the themes we want FSEMs to embody. The idea is to bring in the skills in context as appropriate. The next step is to identify the themes. I’m finding that easier said than done. Examples might include:
* What is a scholar?
* The role of inquiry/exploration (as opposed to learning established ideas)
* Knowledge as development of arguments rather than a collection of facts
* Critical Thinking
* Evidence, credibility, expertise
* Rhetoric
This listing is incomplete at best. I’d really appreciate some additional ideas along these lines and I suspect that talking about it with you will help.
Any suggestions?
I’m trying a new wrinkle in my intro course this semester. I got the idea from Brad Hansen, my department chair. I don’t know exactly what he does, since I’ve gleaned this idea from the grapevine, so any credit for this wrinkle should go to him, while any blame is my own.
I handed back the first exam today. The class scored very well with the average grade a B-. This was not unexpected since the exam covers a lot of material which is review from the first semester. I tell students this is the easiest exam they’ll take from me all year. Despite this success, though, not every student did well.
I decided to try something a bit metacognitive to make exams more of a learning experience. I handed back the exam with the correct answers marked. I then told students that if they reviewed the correct answers and explained to me why they were correct, I would raise their exam grade by half a point for every correct explanation they submitted before Friday.
[Edit: That is, they could get points for every question they got wrong on the exam, but could explain correctly afterwards.]
I’ve never tried this kind of ‘do over’ before, so it will be interesting to see how it works. The remaining exams in the course will be substantially more difficult so I don’t think I’ll be giving away the farm with this curving mechanism. And if it helps them learn the concepts better for the final exam, it will be worth it.
I started to leave a comment on Gardner’s second post about his
recently concluded First Year Seminar, but found it was turning out to be longer than a comment typically is, so I moved it here.
After your previous post I was in awe that you appeared to have found the magic bullet for teaching an FSEM without the snags the rest of us faced. I’m glad to see that you ran into many of the same that I have experienced. 😉 I wish there was a way that the FSEM instructors as a group could collaborate on developing a list of such snags. I think a collective approach to addressing them would be more efficient and probably effective than each of us working on our own. Also, it might be helpful for new FSEM instructors to have a better idea of what to expect, and how not to panic when these snags occur. (Is there perhaps a role here for UMW’s upcoming Center for Teaching Excellence?) Let me respond to some of the specific points you made.
The day I asked the seminarians why they weren’t more lively in the question-and-answer period that followed their classmates’ presentations, and they replied that they didn’t want to ask questions for fear of making their peers look ignorant or stupid. … for most of them it was the absolute truth: they didn’t look at the Q&A as a time to go deeper with what their classmates had already showed they knew, or to bring in interesting connections, or generally to take the level of engagement and enthusiasm and inspiration up a notch or ten.
I ran into this as well. I’ve blogged before about how this year I’ve become more aware of how first year students are different from upper class students, and how they need explicit guidance about how higher education is different from high school. I expect Gardner’s observation above is common with first year students, and it’s something we should put on our common list of FSEM goals: to teach students this deeper purpose of Q&A. It’s not something that comes to them naturally.
[T]he way so many of the third presentations suddenly gelled into the kind of deep, thoughtful, rigorous, playful work I’d been hoping for–and trying to encourage–all along. …
There were times I thought we wouldn’t get there.
I saw this as well. Just when I was starting to give up hope, my students showed the depth of work I was looking for.It seems to take first year students longer to get what we expect in university-level work than upper level students. This isn’t surprising given their training and experience. So an entry level college course need to be less rigorous in content than an upper level course, but also different in terms of instructor’s expectations for how students will make progress towards learning how to do university-level work.
Then there was the day when it became clear that I’d have to tell them they should blog twice a week [emphasis added], when I had hoped that with this small group and a topic of some urgency to all of us music lovers, I could just step back and let the blogging commence.
This is another manifestation of the previous point. First year students need to be more explicitly told what the expectations are. It’s not that we dumb down the type of analysis and other work that we expect of first years, but rather that we need to provide more structure, more scaffolding about how to achieve the type of work.
After two tries at teaching an FSEM, I think that one of the key issues in achieving success is arriving at the right balance between what Gardner calls structure and emergence. The mistake that I’ve made twice now is to put too much emphasis on the latter, but I am getting closer to the target.
At the risk of a bit of reduction, I think the distinction between task-orientation and inquiry-orientation that Gardner raises reflects confusion in the students’ minds about who’s in charge. Are they satisfying an instructor’s requirement by completing a task, or are they searching for the answer to a question they find gripping. It’s the latter that FSEMs are trying to promote, but it’s the former that most students (even upper level students) have experience with.
Another sign of success is the extent to which students adopt a practice of self-reflection about their learning. Obviously, instructors can promote this or not, but when they don’t it’s very unlikely to occur. I was pleased to see that Gardner, like me a year ago, experienced a “Shannon Moment” when an FSEM student demonstrated that they “got it”:
Perhaps the most startling moment of all came after the class was over, when a student in my freshman seminar commented on my Theme Parks and Sandboxes blog post. It was as if something I had been saying over and over, all semester long, had suddenly connected.
Of course, Gardner identifies the most important factor for success in an FSEM:
[M]y best chance is always to let my fascination with the subject carry everything else along with it.
One final observation about the FSEM. I’ve had more interactions down the road with my former FSEM students, than with my other former non-major students, so it appears that the FSEM enables a stronger connection than a general education course.
Dean Dad recently posted on a topic many of us are interested in: the potential of universities replacing their proprietary systems with open source solutions. Might be relevant for anyone thinking about the Bluehost Experiment and it’s downstream implications. (Private joke!)
Don Coffin, a colleague at Indiana University Northwest, just brought my attention to this interesting article in the New York Times.
