Change in average test scores

As you can see, there was a nearly a letter grade improvement in scores on the first test, compared to classes that didn’t have the graded assignments.  There was an improvement on the second test as well, though it’s much more modest than the improvement on the first test.  So the graded assignments appear to help students start off the course on a better footing than they would have otherwise.

However, the scores for the third and fourth tests are nearly half a letter grade lower than for the classes without the graded assignments.  What’s the cause of this drop in performance?  A few possibilities:

• Attrition may explain some of the falloff.  Students who started off more poorly in the classes without the graded assignments are more likely to withdraw from the course earlier – leaving a greater percentage of higher-performing students behind for the last two test.  (The latest a student is allowed to withdraw from a course is shortly after the third test.)
• Student participation in the graded assignments dropped somewhat as the semester progressed.  More students skipped turning in homework before the third and fourth tests compared to the first and second.
• Students are more likely later in the semester to copy their assignments from other students of from tutors in the school’s tutoring center – depriving them of any benefit they might have gotten from doing the assignment.

For the final exam, the students in the graded assignments classes showed a small improvement over the others.

Since these classes are small sections as opposed to large auditorium classes, here’s a look at the median change in test scores for the same set of students.

Change in median test scores

The median scores follow roughly the same trends as the averages do – with better performance on the first two tests and poorer performance on the later tests.  Interestingly, the median final exam scores for the students with graded assignments was slightly lower than the median final exam score for students without the graded assignments.

Dail 911!

And remember, I work at a college.

A deadly combination!

Imagine mixing anything in that list with Taco Bell.  The resulting explosion could level a town!

That’s because it’s the 200th birthday of Robert Bunsen

They’re somewhat crude, so use them at your own risk.  They create a new file rather than overwriting the old one, so the risk in using these should be minimal.

They have gotten the job done for me for at least a  year now.

xoj_numbering_scripts.tar

Any problems or suggested improvements?  Let me know!

Were the Kindle books a little more price competitive, I’d have probably bought about five times as many Kindle books as I have now.

The students who are likely to pass courses come by with questions related to things we’ve been doing in class.  If they did poorly on an assignment, they bring the assignment in with them and ask specific questions about things they weren’t clear on.  They bring in attempts to work the practice problems provided in their study guides.  In short, they come in to see me to talk about chemistry, since I’ve got experience in helping people learn chemistry.

The students who are likely to fail courses show up at my office door, too.  But they’re at my office for a different reason.  They want to discuss, in abstract terms, why they did not do well on their tests.  Grades come up a lot; these students want to know to the exact point what they need to make on their next test.  But chemistry itself never seems to come up, unless I specifically mention it.

The key difference is that students who will likely succeed come by to discuss things related to the topic of the course.  Students who will likely fail come by to discuss everything except the topic of the course.  Food for thought.

Is there anything on this sign that's correct? I do feel sad, though, for the poor student whose book was turned into a room. How is he going to study for his test?.

This one is somewhat embarrassing, since it was made by a staff or faculty member who should have been paying more attention.   If it was indeed made by a faculty member, I hope it wasn’t someone from the English department!

#!/bin/bash
# Remap the side button to bring up context menu.
xsetwacom set "Serial Wacom Tablet" Button1 "button 1"
xsetwacom set "Serial Wacom Tablet" Button2 "button 3"
# Fix the "Serial Wacom Tablet eraser" button to paste
xsetwacom set "Serial Wacom Tablet eraser" Button1 "button 2"
# Calibrate the touchscreen on multitouch X61
xsetwacom --set 'Serial Wacom Tablet touch' 'TopX' '40'
xsetwacom --set 'Serial Wacom Tablet touch' 'TopY' '86'
xsetwacom --set 'Serial Wacom Tablet touch' 'BottomX' '940'
xsetwacom --set 'Serial Wacom Tablet touch' 'BottomY' '948'
# Done

I run this script as a task when my Gnome session starts (System/Preferences/Startup Applications) and I added it to the beginning of /etc/gdm/Init/Default so that I could use the touchscreen to log in.  Since the Gnome on-screen keyboard for the login screen is too small for finger touch, I also edited /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/onboard.desktop to make the onscreen keyboard bigger:

Exec=onboard --size 1022x190 -x 0 -y 0

Now I can log in without the stylus!

You can get the numbers for touchscreen calibration by running:

xinput test 'Serial Wacom Tablet touch'

I did have to tweak the numbers that xinput spit out to get the best overall touchscreen response – just putting the numbers xinput showed for TopX and BottomX resulted in touch being a bit off on the right hand side of the screen.

Source: http://www.ormiret.com/?q=node/26

When it rains, it pours.

Now I’m back online with a spare drive and another fresh Ubuntu 10.04 installation.  So now it’s time to get some more stuff working nicely.

Stylus buttons

Wouldn’t it be nice to have the thumb button on the stylus bring up a menu?  That way, you could use only the stylus to navigate the desktop without having to flip it over.  Ubuntu 10.04, unfortunately, does not provide any tool to change the functions of the stylus buttons.  But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done with a script:

#!/bin/bash
# Remap the side button to bring up context menu.
xsetwacom set "Serial Wacom Tablet" Button1 "button 1"
xsetwacom set "Serial Wacom Tablet" Button2 "button 3"
# Fix the "Serial Wacom Tablet eraser" button to paste
xsetwacom set "Serial Wacom Tablet eraser" Button1 "button 2"

If you save the script above (I saved it as stylusbuttons.sh), you can tell it to be run every time you log in to your desktop using the main menu option System->Preferences->Startup Applications.

Screen rotation

Sometimes it’s nice to use the X61 as a proper tablet – with the screen folded down and the desktop rotated.  Rotating the desktop is simple enough, but the stylus doesn’t rotate with the desktop – making the rotated desktop impossible to use.  This is something I wish Ubuntu would handle automatically, but it’s also something that can be done easily with a script:

#!/bin/bash
# Won't work if the display is something other than 1024x768
# Won't rotate if external monitor is connected
orientation=`xrandr -q | grep -c 1024x768`
if [ $orientation -eq 2 ]; then
   /usr/bin/X11/xrandr --orientation right
   xsetwacom set "Serial Wacom Tablet" Rotate CW
   xsetwacom set "Serial Wacom Tablet eraser" Rotate CW
else
   /usr/bin/X11/xrandr --orientation normal
   xsetwacom set "Serial Wacom Tablet" Rotate NONE
   xsetwacom set "Serial Wacom Tablet eraser" Rotate NONE
fi

Save this as rotation.sh .  It will rotate the desktop and the stylus, leaving you with a usable system.  If you run the same script again while the desktop is rotated, it will restore the desktop and stylus to their original orientation.  If you don’t want to open the terminal window to rotate your desktop, you can use an application launcher in the Gnome panel to run the script.

Fixing the screen saver

In Ubuntu 10.04, the screensaver locks the screen by default, requiring you to enter a password to unlock the screen.  This can be rather annoying on a rotated tablet, since the screen saver does not provide an on-screen keyboard to allow you to unlock the screen.  With so many mobile devices about, you’d think this issue would have been fixed by now, but so far it’s not been done.  It’s not that the screen saver doesn’t support an on-screen keyboard; it’s just that there is no obvious way to turn it on!

Here’s what you need to do:

Install cellwriter, which you have probably already done.  If not,

apt-get install cellwriter

Then, open up gconf-editor.

gconf-editor

Open the apps folder, then click gnome-screensaver.  Make sure the box beside embedded_keyboard_enabled is checked.  Then, click embedded_keyboard_command and set its value to this:

cellwriter --xid --keyboard-only

Now you can unlock the screen with your stylus!  (And you can also curse the Gnome developers for only half-fixing a major and easily-fixable accessibility problem.)