our next book: mckeachie's teaching tips

This morning we met at CTL to go through their book collection and select something for our next meeting. We decided on McKeachie's Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research, and Theory for College and University Teachers by Wilbert J. McKeachie and colleagues. This is one of the classic teaching texts, widely considered a must-read for higher education teachers. We'll be reading Parts 1 and 2 for the May meeting, scheduled for Friday, May 11 from 8:00-9:30am (location TBD). We'll play it by ear as far as how much of it we'll read for the June meeting (date TBD).

A couple of us checked out copies of previous editions of the book, since the topics and material seemed to be consistent throughout the publications, but arranged a little bit differently. There's also a reserve copy of the 10th edition available at Cubberley. If a bunch of us are interested in buying the book, we could get a group order going. Drop a comment if you'd like to do so. In the meantime, if you want to browse through it online, parts of the 11th edition are browsable here.

Runner-up book choices included:

-Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development by David A. Kolb

-The Psychology of Teaching Methods edited by N.L. Gage

-Mastering the Techniques of Teaching by Joseph Lowman

-The Elements of Teaching by James M. Banner, Jr. and Harold C. Cannon

We discussed getting into experiential learning as a possible summer meeting topic and found a very convenient online resource through Stanford's ebrary collection. The book Experiential Learning: A Best Practice Handbook for Educators and Trainers by Colin M. Beard and John P. Wilson is published online in its entirety. (If the link doesn't work, you may have to install the ebrary reader first.) Sarah also mentioned the Association for Experiential Education, which has more resources on this topic.

active learning in lecture courses

I decided to follow up on the idea of making lectures more interactive (Ch. 5 in Bain's book - "How Do They Conduct Class?"). I read through Mazur's Peer Instruction, which is deceptively long, but the majority of the book contains questions for Physics instructors to use for ConcepTests. The ConcepTest is Mazur's way of injecting interactivity into his lecture courses by presenting students with a multiple-choice question, giving them a minute to think about the answer by themselves, and then recording their answers. Then they turn to a classmate to discuss their answers -- Mazur also calls this the convince-your-neighbor approach, since this process is particularly relevant if two students have different answers and/or one student may be more uncertain about an answer than the other. Therefore the uncertain student would be more inclined to change his/her answer. After a short discussion period, students then report their answers again, which may or may not have been revised based on the discussion. Mazur found a significant increase in correct answers after peer instruction, if the original (pre- peer instruction) poll yielded about 35-70% correct answers. He has found that this result extends beyond Harvard students (his own student population), with instructors at high schools, community colleges, and large and small schools all reporting similar results.

The peer discussions are especially helpful in exposing misunderstandings in reasoning, and hearing classmates describe and explain the concepts in their own words -- versus seasoned instructors that may have lost touch with the difficulty of learning a particular concept when teaching it -- seems to make a greater impact in the learning process. Mazur also goes around the classroom to listen in on these discussions, which gives him additional feedback on where students might be tripping up on their conceptual understanding. He uses the repeat-when-necessary approach, i.e. going over material again if there are mostly incorrect answers after the peer instruction period.

Mazur and colleagues have a number of papers on the peer instruction method, including a review of ten years of data using this method. Other papers can be accessed at Mazur Group's website.

The peer instruction method can be implemented into teaching most subjects and integrated with using Personal Response Systems (PRS). Mazur uses a series of mini-presentations within his courses as a lead-in to his ConcepTests. The short lecture format combined with the ConcepTests help to keep students' attention and engage them in the material.

How does this all relate to what Bain discussed? Bain mentioned that getting students to talk in class is key -- not just talking for talking's sake, but productive talking that allows students to engage with ideas and think aloud about what they're trying to learn. He also stated that students seem to learn best when presented with authentic problems of an honorific quality, as opposed to busy work. Overall, instigating discussion within a lecture makes students feel more like active participants in their own learning rather than merely being received knowers.

The Effect of Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation

For next Monday's meeting I delved a little deeper into a section of Chapter 2 of Bain's book. Chapter 2 is titled "What Do We Know About How We Learn?" and the section I pursued a little more is "What Motivates, What Discourages." Specifically I focused on some work by Edward L. Deci on the effect of rewards on intrinsic motivation. In Bain's book he discusses a study in which Deci and his colleagues gave the subjects a puzzle to play with and left the room. Some of the subjects received rewards in the form of payment, others did not. What they found is that the people who received rewards quickly lost interest in the puzzle once the rewards stopped whereas those that did not receive rewards continued to be interested. I looked more closely at some of the research regarding rewards and intrinsic motivation and read a meta analysis that Deci et al. wrote in 1999 reviewing nearly 30 years of research in the field. Here is the link to the abstract and you can download the PDF if you want. It's pretty long.
The general idea is that Deci et al. have created a theory they call Cognitive Evaluation Theory (CET) to predict the effects of rewards on behavior. They find that tangible rewards (money, prizes, etc.) tend to decrease a person's motivation to do an interesting activity. Verbal rewards (positive feedback) in contrast generally tend to increase a person's motivation as long as the feedback is perceived to be informational rather than controlling. They found that verbal feedback which was controlling would also decrease intrinsic motivation. So, essentially if people felt that they were being coerced into doing something, even if they enjoyed doing it initially, they lost interest.

This has profound implications for teaching since evaluation of student work is such a large part of traditional education. Often students do the work to get the grade. My wife, who is a high school teacher, talks about the grade grubbers, students who come weaseling to get a few extra points because they have their sights set on the grade rather than the learning. Although many things are interesting to learn about, very few students would spend time learning them outside of school or assignments. Is this because of the grade based evaluation system? Perhaps. In Ken Bain's book it becomes clear later that many of the best teachers were selected because they inspired interest in their subject which lasted after the students had left their classes. Often, these classes had an atmosphere which was described to be more collaborative, with the professor acting as a facilitator rather than a dictator and the students having significant freedom to decide the course of the class. Evaluation was often left until the end of the term with informational feedback given throughout the course to help students address areas that needed work.
These results seem to mesh fairly well with Deci's theory and it means that to enhance student interest in learning we need to move away from a system which dangles grades as a carrot in front of the students toward a system which supplies meaningful feedback and guidance. I'm sure that this is easier said than done.

Next Meeting This Monday

Hi All, we have conserved the same time and place until now, but it dawned on us that there might be tweaks needed for some people at the begining of each quarter. How does the current time (Monday 5:00pm-6:30pm) and location work for everybody this quarter? Please send us feedback and RSVP as usual so we have a head count.
-ignacio