When Chemists Attack

From CNN, 32 teachers lose their jobs in Florida for buying fake transcripts.

While I sympathize with the idea that continuing ed classes can be a burden on teachers who more often than not already have way too much to do, buying fake credits to cheat your way around the requirements crosses the line.

You wouldn’t accept faked work from your students, why should your students accept it from you?

The punishments stem from a scam run by former high school teacher William McCoggle, who claimed to offer continuing-education classes through a private company. McCoggle pleaded guilty to fraud in November, admitting he did little more than sell transcripts, requiring no tests, homework or other academic work.

Oddly,

dozens of students and parents defended the teachers who lost their jobs, saying that removing them in the middle of the school year would be too disruptive.

On the other hand, it does send the message that cheating will not be tolerated. From anyone.

Here’s more from the Miami Herald

”You don’t know me,” said Currais, one of 32 teachers who was fired or forced to resign for participating in Miami-Dade’s continuing-education credit-buying scandal.“You don’t know anything about me except the one mistake you saw on that paper.”

This is often the reaction I’ve gotten from students who were caught cheating on assignments.

Here’s more.

Many of the teachers who would comment said they never tried to submit the MOTET classes when they renewed their licenses.

”When I realized it didn’t seem like a normal education program, I refused to use the credits I received,” [Maria] Dominguez said. “If the School Board is going to terminate my employment, I will file an appeal and take it to a hearing with the UTD’s support.”

And hopefully this reacher will win the appeal, or not have to go through it in the first place. It’s certainly possible that some of these teachers didn’t know it was a scam until the scammer got their money and they got a transcript without having done any work. My next step might have been to sue the pants off the scammer.

The book reps have been by recently, and one of the things they’re pushing hard is the adoption of student response systems, often called clickers. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s a lot like the “ask the audience” segment of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Students are asked a question by the instructor, andasked to “buzz in” with the answer. Implementations vary – students may have handheld remotes, or they may submit their response with a computer located at their desk, but the effect is the same. It’s supposed to promote reflection – thinking about the material being presented – in the classroom, and increase student learning.

Why are the book reps so keen on promoting clickers? Students buy the remotes along with the textbook for the course, thus netting the book publisher another $40 or so per book sold. Plus, it’s another club to beat over the heads of the used booksellers, who won’t likely have the class-required remotes available.

Textbook prices being what they are, I’m not exactly willing to saddle my students with a much larger book bill (they pay enough for textbook, lab books, and calculator – even getting some of the stuff used) without some nice results demonstrating a clear benefit in the chemistry classroom. As luck would have it, this month’s Journal of Chemical Education has a study comparing clickers to another popular classroom extra – WebCT’s online quizzing. The reseatchers compared students who had access to online quizzes (outside the classroom), students who had in-class clickers, students who had access to both, and students who had access to neither.

On normal tests (written by the teacher), the students who had access to online quizzes (questions chosen by the teacher) did better than other students. This makes sense, since the student is getting used to the testing style of the teacher when taking the online quizzes. The groups with only clickers actually performed more poorly on the tests than all other groups – even the group with access to neither online quizzes nor clickers. Performance, from best to worst, went this way.

1. Online quizzes
2. Online quizzes and clickers
3. Neither online quizzes nor clickers
4. Clickers

So the clickers actually hurt grades! “Negative learning”? (Oddly enough, when the students were asked about clickers, over 80% responded that clickers helped them “reinforce what they learned in class”, and over 70% said the clcikers “helped [them] learn”.)

Perhaps the students became too confident about their knowledge in class and simply did not study as much outside of class compared to the students who weren’t clicking in answers during lecture? (The clickers affect attitude more than retention, perhaps.)

On a national chemistry test, the researchers found that clickers were better than either the combination of clickers and online quizzes or for online quizzes alone – but that this performance was not significantly better than that of students who didn’t have access to either clickers or online quizzes. I’m not sure what to make of that, really.

At any rate, I don’t think I’ll be saddling my students with a much larger textbook bill – at least not without better results than seen here.

Reference: Bunce, D. M.; VandenPlas, J. R.; Havanki, K. L.; J. Chem. Educ.; 2006, 83 (3), 488-493.