When Chemists Attack

I saw this article a few days ago, but (since this is finals week) haven’t had much chance to blog.  It’s about schools trying to cut expenses by going to a four-day week:

Cutting out one day of school has been the key to preserving educational programs and staff in parts of Kentucky, New Mexico and Minnesota, outweighing some parents’ concerns about finding day-care for the day off.

One school district saved $65,000 in transportation costs alone.  (Average annual teacher saqlary is under $50,000.)  And there’s additional energy to be saved by turning stuff off in the unused buildings on Fridays.

The article’s about K-12 schools, and there’s a legitimate argument against moving to a four day week there:  What about parents who have to work five days a week and who suddenly have to find – and pay for – child care for their kids on Friday?  This isn’t an unsolvable problem (as the article notes), but there is a better place for a four day school week:  community colleges.

The typical community college student drives to class each day – sometimes a hour each way.  That’s a lot of driving time for classes that meet 5 days a week.  With the advent of $4 per gallon gas, it’s also expensive. Not to the school itself, but to the students – who already have to put up with soaring textbook prices and rising tuition.

My college seems to be ready to experiment with the four-day week, although it remains to be seen if they’ll want faculty members and staff to come out to the campus to sit behind a desk on Fridays.

Students already love the four-day week idea.  Who wants to be in class on Friday, anyway? 🙂

I didn’t see this commentary at first because, well, I don’t make it a point to pay a lot of attemtion to CNN gasbag Glenn Beck. But sometimes, you’ve got to call out stupidity when you see it:

The Gates Foundation is working to cure malaria, develop new tuberculosis vaccines, and stop the spread of AIDS. Most of our colleges and universities are only working to spread the radical political views of some of their professors.

Really, Glenn? You think that’s all that our colleges are doing? Laughable.

It’s true that some colleges have different missions. Research universities focus a lot of their resources on … research. (Where does Glenn think that lots of this AIDS research is done, anyway?) Two-year colleges focus more on job-related education, etc. But colleges that exist “only to spread the radical political views of some of their professors”? I can’t say that I’ve run into too many of those.

If you’re a college student and you’re reading my blog right now, here’s something for you to think about: How important is it, really, to do well on the first test in a course?

You can always go back and catch up on the beginning stuff any time during the semester- and a semester is a long time. Also, there are usually several other grades that can pull up a bad first test. So how bad can bombing the first test possibly be?

Here’s a chart showing a comparison between students’ grades on their first test and their final course grades. There are about 90 students plotted. Students who withdrew from the course were not included since they had no final course grade to plot.

The yellow box shows all students who both “bombed” their first test with a score of 60 or below and brought their grade back up to make at lease a “C” in the course. Notice how few students appear in that box: three.

So yes, it is pretty important to do well on the first test. Passing the first test doesn’t guarantee success in a course, but failing it almost always leads to failing the course. Think about that before you head out to another late-night party the night before your test!

Since I teach at a college, I get a fair amount of junk mail from publishers’ representatives wanting to sell me … or force me to make my students buy … their educational doo-dads. Here’s one from my inbox this morning.

Dear Professor […]:

In a recent message to you, we noted that in a general chemistry class recently taught at the University of North Texas, students who completed more than 90% of the OWL problems assigned earned an average grade of 89.3%—while students who did not follow the assignments earned an average grade of 66.3%. With results like these, it’s no wonder OWL [Online Web-based Learning] is the most popular chemistry learning system in use today.

They’re trying to sell me an “online homework” system. I’ve been incorporating web content into my courses for a decade now, and one thing that my students have always had trouble with was web-based chemistry problem sets. Chemistry problems just don’t lend themselves easily to input into a computer – for instructors or for students.

(And besides, I already have plenty of online content for my courses, all free to my students…)

But the real reason this e-mail caught my eye is the sales pitch [emphasis mine]:

[…] students who completed more than 90% of the OWL problems assigned earned an average grade of 89.3%—while students who did not follow the assignments earned an average grade of 66.3%.

You don’t say! Students who complete nearly all of their practice assignments actually make better grades? There’s a shocker.

But why should this revelation make me want to force this product onto my students? I observe the same sort of pattern whether I have assignments on the web or on paper. The students who make higher grades generally spend more time with the material and complete more of their practice assignments.

The problem is getting students to spend time with the material.  I somehow doubt that this product runs on an Xbox 360!

For a while, I’ve maintained a website for the students in my chemistry classes. I put study guides, notes, solutions to quizzes and tests, schedules, and various other things on the site.

Shortly after redesigning the web site to use WordPress, I received this handwritten comment from a student on my instructor evaluations:

I feel that the students should get study guides to study with for the tests.

Where were the study guides?

http://[address]/?page_id=2

I’ve deleted the address of the site, since it’s a school site just for students. But if you’re familiar with how WordPress organizes things, you’ll notice that the page containing all the course study guides was the second page I ever posted to the site. (It was also the second link from the top of the page, just under the link to the course syllabus.)

By the time the class got to their first test, I’d added more pages. So I wonder – did this student just see the list of resources available for the course and just decide that there was too much stuff to bother with? What amount of resources is too much? What amount is too little?