Posts Tagged ‘teaching’
February 12, 2010
A friend forwarded an article on cognitive fluency called “Easy=True” by Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe. According to Bennett:
Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard.
The article outlines the many ways that fluency shapes our perceptions of everyday events ranging from analyzing threats to evaluating marital happiness. This observation leads some counterintuitive results, though. For instance, Bennett notes, “to get people to think through a question, it may be best to present it less clearly.”
A few studies suggest that disfluency works well as a prompt to get people to think carefully and catch mistakes. Alter and Oppenheimer found that using a more difficult font can get students to do better on the Cognitive Reaction Test, a three-question test that usually trips up people answering intuitively. In another study, they found that disfluency also led people to think more abstractly. Schwarz and Song found that a difficult font can dramatically increase the number of people who correctly respond to the question, “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?” (The answer is “none” – Moses wasn’t on the Ark.)
In other words, to get people to think carefully and to prevent them from making silly mistakes, make them work to process the question: make the font hard to read, the cadence awkward, and the wording unfamiliar.
That is why all my books going forward will be formatted like CAPTCHAs.
Posted in sociology | 1 Comment »
Tags: boston globe, cognition, education, social psychology, sociology, teaching
January 26, 2010
Teach for America is celebrating its twentieth anniversary and there are a number of articles floating around about what works in the program and what doesn’t. One TFA alum and UVA PhD student just wrote an interesting post on Good arguing that weak literacy is the primary reason students struggle in school.
Amanda Ripley also wrote an excellent profile in The Atlantic on Steven Farr and the methods TFA use to evaluate teachers and judge what is effective and what isn’t in the classroom.
Farr and the TFA have just published a book called Teaching as Leadership that goes into more detail about the tools they use for measuring what makes a good teacher.
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Tags: atlantic, education, sociology, teach for america, teaching
January 11, 2010
Nikhil Swaminathan writes in his blog on Good about what might happen if parents stopped putting their children in private school and enrolled them in public schools instead. Citing the work of Steve Barr, he links to a USA Today article about the recession “forcing many private school-favoring parents to send their kids to public school for financial reasons.”
Attracting (and keeping) the children of middle class and upper class families who would have attended private schools in the past could lead to major improvements in public school systems. Of course, the same budget problems driving this shift also mean that states and cities have gutted public education budgets, so I’m not optimistic about public schools really being able to keep students without major reforms. As NYU sociologist Pedro Noguera says in the USA Today article, “Public schools play such an important role for our democracy as the only institution that serves all children,” he says. “If you lose the people who have the power of choice because they have the resources and the information and the time to make a difference, it becomes a system that only serves people who have no other option. And that’s a problem.”
Posted in sociology | Leave a Comment »
Tags: education, good, inequality, nyc, pedro noguera, sociology, teaching, usa today
January 4, 2010
In the New York Times, Amanda Fairbanks wrote an interesting profile of some new research by Doug McAdam on Teach for America. Inspired by his research on Freedom Summer, McAdam wanted to see if the TFA volunteers shared the same long term commitment to civic engagement that the activists who participated in the 60s civil rights movement possessed. He found that the TFA alums lag behind their non-TFA peers in current service activity, tend to vote at lower rates than non-TFA participants, and tend to not work in “pro-social” jobs after finishing up their time w/ TFA. The research was published in the December issue of Social Forces.
One of McAdam’s colleagues, Rob Reich, offered a few explanations on his blog for why TFA alumni might participate at lower levels after volunteering for two years:
- TFA volunteers “were already off the charts on civic engagement when they applied to TFA,” so it would be unusual for them to score even higher after the teaching experience.
- The TFA corps members probably took a “service break.” Kind of like the “donor fatigue” that fundraisers encounter.
- Finally, McAdam’s study didn’t measure specific forms of “education engagement, which is an area that TFA experience might plausibly effect.”
While the average TFA alum may be burnt out on civic engagement, there are a few notable exceptions. In particular, I’m impressed with the work of Nick Ehrmann. A recent Princeton sociology PhD, who has started a new non-profit called the Blue Engine. Nick draws on his experiences with TFA to put together a corps of tutors, who help high school students to acquire the advanced academic skills that they will need to succeed in college.
Posted in sociology | Leave a Comment »
Tags: education, ehrmann, mcadam, social movements, sociology, teach for america, teaching
October 29, 2009
A few folks have been writing about their experiences teaching sociology/anthropology this semester. Here are a few recent highlights:
Rex at Savage Minds writes about his “For the Next Time” syllabus.
Wicked Anomie offers a post about teaching logical fallacies.
John Glass picks up on a thread from the TEACHSOC listserv about handling students’ complaints about controversial topics.
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Tags: sociology, teaching
October 22, 2009
Oregon State sociologist Kristen Barker has been asking her sociology undergraduates to write sociology haiku for the last few years. They take some liberties with the traditional Japanese poetry (not much nature imagery and it would be hard to say the poem in one breath like conventional haiku). However, if the project gets students to use their sociological imaginations, it’s probably a good thing. They have now published 100 of the haiku in a book. You can read more about her project here and here. I’m hoping that there will be a sequel, Tanka for Social Theorists.
Here’s a sample:
If culture is lost
to mass consumerism,
Can we buy it back?
– by Laura (Beth) Caudill, junior, OSU
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Tags: sociology, teaching
September 9, 2009
Joshua Kim writes in his blog at Inside Higher Ed about how he asked his students to create their own mash-up videos using clips from other sources. However, the results of his assignment were unexpected:
Much to my surprise my students were less then excited about making mashup with the videos that I had provided for them. What they wanted to do was go off and find their own video clips. They were much happier grabbing clips from YouTube, or interviewing other students, then using the media I had provided. In fact, if I had not “forced” them to use the assigned videos then none of them would have done so.
Why don’t our students want to work with the media we (with great effort) provided for them? One reason may be simply that the videos I assigned students to watch were too long. Students really do work and think in small chunks. . . . A second reason, I think, has to do with control. Students want to be in control of what they watch. They want to search and find, particularly if they are creating, rather then be given the ingredients.
While the assignment didn’t go as planned this time, I think this has real potential. You can see Joshua’s students projects here.
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Tags: digital culture, inside higher ed, multimedia, sociology, teaching, technology
September 8, 2009
Over the weekend, I read about textbooks being made available on the iPhone. I have an ebook reader, and I use it everyday. I love it. However, we read for different reasons and the way I read the NY Times on my Kindle or read a Tracey Kidder book is not the way I would read a literature anthology or might study for a psychology test. This morning I came across a post on SnarkMarket about how we read. Tim’s argument relates to libraries, but he brings up a conversation between Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others about technology that speaks to the cellphone textbook idea:
I’m paraphrasing, but one of the things Gates talks about are the different spaces of experiencing digital technology. The “four-foot experience” – whether you’re watching TV or gaming or watching a movie – is fundamentally different from that of the office PC or the laptop or the handheld. They’re reciprocally different. They require different technologies, different interfaces, to match their different possibilities and inherited rituals.
We haven’t figured this out for digital readers yet – how to vary the hardware and software to match the different possibilities and rituals of reading in different contexts. We don’t have the ordinary library experience, or classroom experience, let alone the Library of Congress experience.
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Tags: publishing, reading, teaching, technology
August 28, 2009
This week there are a number of good posts with advice for graduate students. Here are a few of my favorites:
Jenn Lena raises questions about face work and appropriate attire for GTAs at her blog What is the What.
Andrew offers a summary of the “7 habits of highly successful doctoral students” from a talk at Columbia at the Union Street blog.
Total Drek features an entertaining link to a pie chart showing who students believe from Graph Jam.
Over at Savage Minds, Rex writes up a short review of Michele Lamont’s book, How Professors Think. He encourages grad students to check out chapter 5.
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Tags: education, graduate students, sociology, teaching
July 1, 2009
*Except being online isn’t really what makes this type of learning effective.
It’s really about the time that students spend learning. While I suspect most people will get focus on the headline, the real story is that the Dept of Education has confirmed that if you spend more time studying, interacting with students and professors, and completing projects for class, you will be a more successful student. In an article on the report, Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed writes:
Notably, the report attributes much of the success in learning online (blended or entirely) not to technology but to time. “Studies in which learners in the online condition spent more time on task than students in the face-to-face condition found a greater benefit for online learning,” the report says.
In noting caveats about the findings, the study returns to the issue of time.
“Despite what appears to be strong support for online learning applications, the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is superior as a medium,” the report says. “In many of the studies showing an advantage for online learning, the online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. It was the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that produced the observed learning advantages. At the same time, one should note that online learning is much more conducive to the expansion of learning time than is face-to-face instruction.”
In addition, not all online teaching practices are effective. According to the Dept of Education report, those that encourage interaction seem to be the best. Jaschik notes:
While the new study provides a strong endorsement of online learning, it also notes findings about the relative success (or lack thereof) of various teaching techniques used in online courses. The use of video or online quizzes — frequently encouraged for online education — “does not appear to enhance learning,” the report says.
Using technology to give students “control of their interactions” has a positive effect on student learning, however. “Studies indicate that manipulations that trigger learner activity or learner reflection and self-monitoring of understanding are effective when students pursue online learning as individuals,” the report says.
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Tags: data, education, inside higher ed, sociology, teaching, technology
