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You either have to reject the research, or you have
to rebuild your brain.
And it was only when I started rebuilding my brain that I began
to have more power to think about teaching.
It's easy to stick with simple answers, it's easy to blame
somebody else.
It's particularly easy to blame the students because sometimes
it's their fault.
Since it's sometimes their fault, it's easy to think
that it's usually their fault.
A transfer from sometimes to usually is one of those
that happens to us invisibly, right?
We know that some students really do have
problems--mother's dying of cancer, they're dying of cancer.
I had one who was born with spina bifida.
He'd been told every year of his life he had three years to live.
He was walking around with, he claimed, levels of opiates
that would kill people if you just started straight on them,
and he didn't bother telling me this.
He was acing the course, but he had to miss an exam
for an emergency operation.
So he came around to find out if I would mind if he made
the exam up.
Students, some of them, have real problems.
But that's not the usual reason they do poorly.
It's because we have [unclear audio].
It's a hard switch, took me years to make it,
so if you don't find it attractive.
It's so attractive to build into the system to blame
the students, blame the admission office.
If they just admit great students, we could teach
them...interesting thought that way.
Other questions?
(male speaker). You talked about online,
and I guess distance learning.
What about technology in the classroom,
is that the same thing?
(Dr. Nelson). The question is
what are you using the technology for?
So if what you're doing is using clickers as a way of doing two
things, getting active learning and getting the faculty member
instant feedback, it's a really powerful thing to do.
There's some literature that shows just how powerful.
And the question then is, what question can you ask that would
lead to deeper understanding of that, that would allow you
to design even more effective uses of clickers.
One of the things we know in physics is it works really well
if you design, if you're using it for a multiple choice
question in which the alternative answers are based
on some prior systematic research into how do students
misunderstand this.
They aren't drawn out of the faculty member's mind,
our perceptions are drawn out of real research and then there
are misunderstandings.
One simple way to do that is to, in the proceedings of mastery,
ask fill-in-the-blank questions, and tabulate the frequency
of wrong answers, and use the most common wrong answer both
to redesign your delivery and to check whether the redesign got
rid of one of those, and you're going to do that with a clicker.
So you could be in the constant process of using
fill in the blank questions which you pick up and analyze
to design better and better clicker questions.
Or otherwise coming up with hypotheses and what those
alternatives are, what the students are going to discuss.
And so one simple way to look at the question is, what should I
be having the students discuss to get maximum learning needs?
And the same for say, PowerPoint.
What besides a fixed screen can you do with PowerPoint,
which in my hands puts students to sleep.
I went back to transparent, overhead transparencies, because
they were more dynamic in my hands than the PowerPoint.
So if you're going to use PowerPoint, how can you make it
dynamically effective in producing learning?
Can you actually beat an overhead transparency?
And if so, by how much?
With a clicker we know you can, with the clicker
and the misconceptions, we know you can double learning.
But the key thing is the frame of your question, which this is
an emperical question, not one to be answered with data,
not one to be answered with the faculty member's perception
or by student enthusiasm necessarily, although you might
want to measure student enthusiasm.
Certainly the number of students going to sleep
is an important variable.
[audience laughter].
Especially if you've ever had any significant number
go to sleep when you switch to PowerPoint like I did,
and suddenly you've got a whole lot.
Occasionally, I'd have a student go to sleep who clearly
in physiological duress.
And I didn't count that against the teaching, but I was having
students nod off out of boredom, which is not a state
I was used to.
Yeah.
(male speaker). You mentioned, I think,
the History Department at IU was in the process
of sort of sharing some of these ideas.
(Dr. Nelson). Actually, you go to
IUB.edu.histsotl, histsotl, or something.
History and sotl.
I think it's H-I-S-T-S-O-T-L.
They've got a description of the project up and so forth.
Sorry, that wasn't.
(male speaker). I appreciate that,
but do you have suggestions for how
institutions or departments could begin to try to effect
some of those things.
You know, if one section of the department is into this type
of research and make some progress in it, how to kind of
disperse that effectively.
(Dr. Nelson). What they did that
I think was unusually powerful, was they came up
with this question of what does it mean to think like
a whatever your discipline, what's your discipline?
(male speaker). Chemistry.
(Dr. Nelson). What does it mean to think
like a chemist, what's known in the literature about that?
And then they started interviewing each other.
(male speaker). They had sort of a buy-in from--
(Dr. Nelson). From a small number,
and then said to the others, could we interview you?
Would you be willing to, on camera, answer these kinds
of questions?
If we want students to think like a chemist, what does it
mean to think like a chemist and how is that different
from memorizing information?
And their colleagues agreed, over half the department
ended up participating.
So that seemed to me to be really powerful.
The kind of thing that ought to happen is every faculty member
should be able to answer in writing the question,
how is the pedagogy you're using, how does it compare with
the best practices known anywhere in the country
for that course?
So if you're teaching introductory chemistry
or organic chemistry, what's been shown to work?
Particularly, what has been shown to work for students from
under-powered backgrounds who aren't quite as fully prepared.
And if you do that, then pretty soon you'll end up finding out
about Dennis Jacobs at Notre Dame.
And you'll find that what he did was, they found at Notre Dame
that math SAT score was a powerful predictor of success
in introductory chemistry, and in fact, that low SAT scores
virtually guaranteed low grades in introductory chemistry.
So he took the lowest quarter of the SAT distribution,
taught them in a much more active fashion, and got the
same grade distribution as his colleagues were getting
with traditional teaching.