Taking Notes in Science Courses

I tend to write a significant amount in my lectures and some students have expressed frustration that the act of note taking prevents them from actually learning. That is pretty much why I am going to the Tablet PC this year and will drop the course notes on the website. I would note however that the issue of learning and note taking has been the subject of academic research.

Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research,and Theory for College and University Teachers
by Wilbert J. McKeachie; D.C.Heath and Company, 1994
ISBN # 0-669-19434-4; pages 59 and 60.

"Several studies show that students who take notes remember material better than a control group not taking notes even though the note takers turned in their notes immediately after the lecture. Note taking involves elaboration and transformation of ideas, which increases meaningfulness and retention (Peper and Mayer, 1978; Weiland and Kingbbury, 1979). But note taking has costs as well as benefits. Student strategies of note taking differ. Some students take copious notes; others take none. We know that student information processing capacity is limited; that is, people can take in, understand, and store only so much information in any brief period of time.

Information will be processed more effectively if the student is actively engaged in analyzing and processing the information rather than passively soaking it up.

Students' ability to process information depends upon the degree to which the information can be integrated or "chunked." No one has great ability at handling large numbers of unrelated items in active memory. Thus when students are in an area of new concepts or when the instructor is using language that is not entirely familiar to the students, students may be processing the lecture word by word or phrase by phrase and lose the sense of a sentence or of a paragraph before the end of the thought is reached.

This means that lecturers need to be aware of instances in which new words or concepts are being introduced and to build in greater redundancy as well as pauses during which students can catch up and get appropriate notes.

Snow and Peterson (1980) point out that brighter students benefit more from taking notes than less able students. We believe that this is because the less able students cannot, while they write their notes, keep what they hear in their memories, so that their note taking essentially blocks them from processing parts of the lecture. But this is not simply a matter of intelligence; rather a student's ability to maintain materials in memory while taking notes and even to process and think about relationships between one idea and other ideas depends upon the knowledge or cognitive structures the student has available for organizing and relating the material. Thus the background of the student in the area is probably more important than the student's level of intelligence.

Some faculty members hand out prepared notes or encourage the preparation of notes for students to purchase. Hartley's research, as well as that of Annis (1981) and Kiewra (1989), suggests that a skeletal outline is helpful to students but with detailed notes students relax into passivity. It is better simply to provide an overall framework which they can fill in by selecting important points and interpreting them in their own words, Because student capacity for information processing is limited and because students cannot stop and go over again a confusing part of a lecture, you need to build more redundancy into your lectures than into writing, and you need to build in pauses when students can catch up and think rather than simply struggle to keep up."

Exam Design in the Physical Sciences

We are in the deepest, darkest part of our exam schedule and there is a fairly constant stream of students that come to my office with really one question on their mind and they cannot bring themselves to ask it directly so they ask a number of oblique questions that circumnavigate what they really want to ask.

What is on the exam?

In the Physical Sciences there is an expectation of content mastery that typically involves "problem solving" (now there is a term that by itself is a problem). The issue is always how much time do you as a professor allot for students to stare at the ceiling and think during a chemistry exam?

There are a number of aspects of this issue of exam design. Here in a small liberal arts and science college we have the luxury of being able to ask essay questions. This is because the numbers are small enough that we can cope with the marking. In larger universities, even if they don't just resort to multiple choice questions, quite often the questions are choped up into sub-questions so that the marking becomes a series of right / wrong decisions.

At its simplest level the expectation is that the professors will set an exam that the professors themselves can sit down and physically right out the complete, correct solution set in one third of the time allotted. Theoretically, this means that the average student (see below) will be able to write the exam in two thirds of the time allotted and still have one third of the time for thinking / correction / addition.

The real issue comes down to choice. In my exams there is typically choice, especially for the high value questions. Choice is also a luxury of the small liberal arts and science college. The issue with choice however is that there are really two kinds of high value choice questions: 1) the very long death-march question that wrings all the information out of the student that they have learned or 2) the shorter, thinking question that tests what the student understands. If a student decides to answer three death march questions they are going to run out of time and many a tear-stained final exam has ended with the ink trailing off the last page scrawling "ran out of time, exam too long". On the other hand if you have a student that is smarter than the average bear a canny choice of questions can have them out of the exam with a high mark even though they only wrote out one an a half pages of material.

No one ever said that life, or exams, were fair. A University is not a democracy, it is a meritocracy. Perversely, things get easier as you get smarter and harder as you get weaker. Almost Darwinian.

Deadwood in the Liberal Arts and Sciences

Deadwood is an expression referring to tenured faculty that have reached the point of burn-out and unfortunately it has occurred before they can retire early. These professors feel entitled to their paycheques (and let's face it what they do can hardly be called a job) because, back when the dinosaurs ruled the Earth, they did some amazing things, they developed new courses, had an active research program and served on committees that shaped the policy and direction of the whole University.

Now, well now is another story. They gather in each others offices and gnaw the dry bones of old arguments. They deliver their courses as if someone pulls a string out of their back and the lectures just roll out of them. They, in fact, have unlimited time at their disposal and keen intellects so that they can quickly move from "harmless old farts" to very dangerous foes. Their enemy is change, their call to arms is merit and their moto is tradition.

All Universities have them. They are a necessary evil of the tenure process. Indeed, the whole idea of tenure almost requires that the same system that is designed to form new faculty will leave some of them mangled and in the healing they become twisted versions of what they were before.

The problem that is particularly evident in the liberal arts and science university is that the committees that meet to review the files on tenure applicants are often multi-disciplinary. This means that each time they meet there is a requirement to re-define all the terms about what a peer reviewed article is and what value a book has to a chapter to a review to a journal article to a conference proceeding to a conference presentation. All of this becomes uniquely defined by the academic backgrounds of the committee members.

We all know, that in all situations, academics will draw the line between right and wrong, adequate and inadequate just microscopically less then their own position in the discipline. It is the very arbitrariness of this setting of standards that can get applicants upset. In the liberal arts and science tradition strict formulae for research + teaching + service are not favoured because they will always end up favouring activity of one sort over another or imposing the norms for one discipline over another.

That is where the deadwood grows.

New Teaching Methods in the Liberal Arts Classroom

Oh yeah, we had a slick talking, peer-study program selling guy blow through our school a few years back. A bunch of us got prepared and redeveloped our course and went into peer-study in a big way. We did the placement tests and followed the program for creating effective peer-study groups and then sold it to the students as if we were selling life insurance on commission.

It was a disaster.

In my case (I teach Chemistry) I had an almost twice as high drop-out rate. What happened over and over again was that the weaker students were forced into intimate contact with motivated, intelligent students. This did not cause them to aspire to a higher standard but in fact caused them to despair. By the time we put out the fires we decided that an important dynamic in our courses was "plausible deniability" for the mediocre to weak students and if they found out too early that learning was hard work they would all just fold up and switch majours to Business.

I Ate an Apple for Lunch Today

Just another post in my repository of the mundane.

A Teaching Philosopy

I have taught at the University level since 1989 and have learned over the years that a self-referential style that focuses on what I found interesting and how I understood that material is a minimalist teaching philosophy that works for a very small sub-set of most classes. This, however, is exactly the way most science courses are taught.

Since my first years of teaching I have come to a couple of realizations about what creates the most effective learning environment.

Priority #1 The teacher must love what they teach

Priority #2 The teacher must love who they teach

This may seem to be backward but I have found over and over again that this has to be true. If the teacher does not love what they teach... if they are not somehow consumed by the subject then they will always be willing to compromise the principles of what they are teaching for who they are teaching. Especially in small classes where the subjective mentor - student interaction can overwhelm the objective mastery of content.

This, by the way, explains the elements of evangelicalism that people find in the different disciplines. This fervent, low-key evangelical spirit that whispers to the students "this is an amazing, wonderful world and there is a way to understand how this small part of it works, I understand this path and want you to know it too. I need you to respond by capturing for at least a moment the sense of wonder and lostness that I felt when I first understood this path to knowledge and truth. I also need you to hold this torch up when it is my turn to set it down". If the person who teaches does not feel that they are somehow in possession of a precious truth then I don't know how they force themselves to teach. I know over and over from talking to students that it was just such a teacher that first gave them the idea of advanced studies.

Yes, we have to love the students but we have got to love what we teach. We have got to feel that the truth that we have fought so hard to understand is worth passing on and worth maintaining.

Now, to be complete we do have to allow for the deadwood response "I do it for the money" but I doubt that anyone would be happy with that for a teaching philosophy.

An Answer is not Always a Solution

Students benefit from the whole concept of part marks. There is of course a tension that immediately develops concerning the nature of a correct response to a question. Does the question require that a final correct answer is the key objective or does the question imply that the student should follow a path to the correct answer and that the path may in fact be more important than the destination itself. In my mind I have always distinguished between the answer and the solution of a question. This has everything to do with part marks.

The answer to a question is brief to the point of a single number with units. A solution describes a complete path from the question to the final answer.

If students expect part marks for solutions that have incorrect final answers then they must also be willing to accept only part marks if the solution is incomplete even if the final answer is correct. The problem of course is assessing where on the path did the student make a mistake and does that demonstrate a simple slip or actual lack of knowledge. On the other hand, does an incomplete solution indicate a quick mind that recognized a step as trivial or does it mean that when asked a different question where the step is not trivial they will fail to get a correct answer?

A solution may be brilliantly set up and sweep majestically to the wrong answer or a solution may be a crooked wreck of a thing that tails across the page as a yard of toilet paper stuck to your shoe but still gets to the correct answer.

In math the rigour is very high and it is assumed that all steps will be explicitly shown. A good solution at the end of a long path in math is therefore followed with the majestic Latin acronym Q.E.D. (quod erat demonstrandum "that which was to be demonstrated"). In physics, the handmaid of mathematics, it is expected that a solution will consist of a number of parts including a suitable diagram that establishes the frame of reference with the relative positions and magnitudes of the elements of the problem. This is followed by stating the relevant given information (converted if necessary to the form required for the solution). The standard form of the relevant equation is then given followed by the form that isolates the unknown variable. The symbols are then substituted with the numbers from the problem and the math completed to give a final answer. In Physics it is usual for the solution to be completed with a very brief statement of the final answer to the problem.

Chemistry is the wayward child of Physics and thus follows the intent, if not the complete form, for a solution as that in Physics. The structure is the same but usually a diagram is not required and a completing statement is generally not necessary as long as the solution sequence gives a clear final answer.