When Chemists Attack

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.

CNN has an article up about a recently released report on high school dropouts.

The report can be downloaded from here – unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be an HTML version, only a PDF

http://www.civicenterprises.net/pdfs/thesilentepidemic3-06.pdf

In a nutshell:

• 47% of dropouts say that their classes were not interesting.
• 69% say they were not motivated/inspired to work hard
• 70% say they could have graduated if they had tried
• 88% say that they were passing when they dropped out
• 81% say they recognize a high school diploma is “vital to their success”
• 74% would have stayed in school if they were able to “do it again”

The results are certainly interesting, but this was a poll (the study does not indicate – or at least I couldn’t find where it indicated – that actual transcripts of the dropouts were obtained). Having quite a bit of experience comparing student perceptions of academic performance with actual academic performance, I’ll simply say I notice that many students think that they are doing better than they actually are. I don’t think that they are necessarily lying about it, but many students simply don’t know whether they’re passing or not. I’m not buying the “88% were passing” figure without transcripts, frankly.

Lots of students complained that their classes were “boring” or “not relevant” to their future job prospects or to their “life”. I wonder if having more contact with people that work outside of the school or people in industry can help.

Both the teachers and the students need this interaction – the teachers so they can use more real-world examples, and the students so that they will believe that the real-world examples are relevant. Some students simply won’t believe that anything they don’t choose to do on their own is important. I see too many pre-nursing students around here who actually don’t believe that things like basic knowledge of human anatomy or the ability to calculate how much of a drug to give a patient will be useful in the nursing profession!

Will more contact with “real” professionals at an earlier age make their lessons more “relevant” and save these students?

PZ Myers, at rips into the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen for wasting electrons with a flow of bull called What is the value of algebra?. Cohen consluded that

Writing is the highest form of reasoning. This is a fact. Algebra is not.

… which, however you try to parse it, is sheer stupidity.

In the comments thread on PZ’s blog, though, we find a link to the story that got Cohen to go off the deep end, and it’s much more intertesting that Cohen’s garbage.

A Formula for Failure in L.A. Schools

This is the story of Gabriela Ocampo, a high school dropout, and the LA school system. There appear to be many failures – and blame enough to go all around.

Gabriela failed that first semester of freshman algebra. She failed again and again — six times in six semesters.

Frankly, what business does the school system have putting this student in the same class six times in a row and letting her fail? With this many failures, why wasn’t the student evaluated to see what level of math she was functioning at and placing her there? Or checking to see if there was some sort of psychological problem or learning disability evident? The student’s supposed to be getting an education, not a ride on the “Ferris Wheel of Algebra”!

But it’s not just the school at fault, here.

Shane Sauby, who worked as an attorney and stockbroker before becoming a teacher, volunteered to teach the students confronting first-year algebra for a second, third or fourth time. He thought he could reach them.

But, Sauby said, many of his students ignored homework, rarely studied for tests and often skipped class.

If the parents of these students don’t care enough to see that they’re actually in their classes in the first place, it’s no wonder that the students themelves don’t care. It’s uphill work to teach someone who simply does not want to learn, and it becomes an impossible job if the students simply don’t show up in the first place.

Gabriela’s algebra teacher learned this the hard way.

Only seven of 39 students brought their textbooks. Several had no paper or pencils. One sat for the entire period with his backpack on his shoulders, tapping his desk with a finger.

Gabriela […] skipped 62 of 93 days that semester.

I’m torn when I read stuff like this. On the one hand, I feel sorry for students like Gabriela, who may have been “passed” in lower-level classes that they shouldn’t have passed and find themselves in way over their head in high school. On the other hand, I feel that people who can’t be bothered to make even the most basic effort in a class neither deserve to pass the class nor deserve to be given a high school diploma. Less than 20% of these people could trouble themselves to simply bring their book … and that’s when they did show up!

One other point to bring out is the class size. The last thing students with a history of failure need is to be put into a large class environment. They probably need much more individual help than the teacher (however good) can possibly give them. Even a class half the size of Gabriela’s might be too large. This, unfortunately, is probably caused by lack of funds. (Tax cuts and budget cuts are the rage these days.) Education is expensive, but I still believe ignorance costs more in the long run.

Another interesting point from the article is yet another sign that we might want to rethink how we distribute funds for schools. One school has decided to take students who fail their algebra classes and simply put them into remedial classes focusing not on algebra but on the basic math skills from earlier grades that these students probably lack. Sounds good, and it appears that their students actually end up doing better in algebra in the long run. But …

The state can lower the academic rankings of schools that remove ninth graders from first-year algebra. Consistently low rankings can invite district audits and penalties, including removal of teachers and administrators.

So, getting the students the help they need might cause the school to lose funding and teachers! This, apparently, is what some people think “accountability” means.

Read the article, and see the train wreck in LA for yourself. It’ll take money, effort, and time to get it fixed – from parents, from students, from schools, from teachers, and from government. Who’s up for it?