I spent about forty years teaching, first in economics departments and a business school then in law schools, and came up with a number of ideas about how it could be done better. Here are some of them. An Application of Economics to Giving Exams After answering the questions you know the answers to you still have time left so you answer the remaining questions in the hope that what you write will fool the professor grading the exam into thinking that you know at least part of the answer. Doing that costs you time writing and me time reading what you wrote. It lowers the quality of the information the exam produces, since there is a risk that I will either be fooled into giving you credit you do not deserve or fail to give another student partial credit he does deserve because I think he is bluffing.
I once had the misfortune of having a physics teacher who considered reading the textbook adequate instruction in its contents. He assigned a chapter, then lectured solely on advanced topics that derived from the chapter's contents. After a few weeks of this (in a 102 class, mostly nonmajors), I showed up to his office hours to berate him on behalf of the large fraction of the class who were utterly lost. I think he, by the end of the quarter-hour, at least temporarily understood that he needed to teach the basics in his class about the basics. Who knows how long that stuck. And this was at a fairly elite *teaching* school, Reed College (professor likely now retired).
As they say of interviews and hiring processes, so too of classes: almost all the teachers students encounter are terrible, and so they will tend to learn habits which are best suited to terrible teaching. Validity of the converse - that most students you teach are terrible - may vary wildly by school.
When considering the 5% highlighters, consider that the textbook authors are frequently as bad as my physics professor; for much of the textbook , "what [...] the rest of the book is there for" has no sensible answer; it's to pad the page count, or indulge the author, if they even thought it through that much. C.F. Feynman's disgust at the entire slate of available elementary school textbooks, as written up in _What Do You Care What Other People Think?_.
Back when I was teaching computer science (which “The Paper Chase” tells me is quite different from law) I invented an idea I quite liked. I didn’t teach long enough to have a big back-catalog of previous exams, so when I wrote an exam I just gave the students a *heavily* redacted copy of it a few days earlier. It was enough to show them the sorts of skills they would need to solve the problems, but not anything they would be able to do in advance and memorize.
I never heard if they found it helpful or irritating. :-)
Listening vs reading is not mysterious. We evolved to watch and listen in order to learn from others (see Heinrich’s book “The Secret of Our Success”); it is a capability a hundred thousand years old, and we all have it. Reading is less than ten thousand years old and we didn’t really start selecting for it en masse until much more recently, a few centuries perhaps. Relatively few of us manage to get really good at it, just as even fewer get really good at chess.
The mass lecture is not a great substitute for apprenticeship, but it’s still more natural than learning from a book.
Experimental evidence suggests this is false. It's one of the more popular "learning styles" theories that infest education, and they're routinely found to have no predictive validity.
I favor a simple theory which can be heard in any business school: the proper way to convey information is: "Tell them what you're gonna tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them." Or in another dialect: spaced repetition should start with a spacing so small it's immediate.
When I read Maths/CompSci at Cambridge most undergraduates attended the lectures but we also had the tutorials to explain the lectures and to test our knowledge by tying to answer exam like questions
I always tried to take tests without any preparation other than having gone to class. I really wanted to find out how well I had been learning. Some teachers had easy tests, which always disappointed me. Some teachers had such hard tests that I and everyone I knew could only answer maybe half the questions, and I always wondered who they were meant for.
One of my pet theories for changing education is to separate classes and exams. Go to the university, take all the classes you want, as many as you want, as long as you want.
If you want to find out how well you are learning, find a testing company which has a reputation for good thorough exams and doesn't try to prevent or detect cheaters, probably mostly take-home exams.
If you want to convince employers how much you have learned, go to a testing company who takes cheating very seriously. They might even use the same exams, but the testing conditions will be much less conducive to cheating.
But keep all testing out of classes. Make classes all about teaching and learning.
Separating teaching and testing seems like it would eliminate useful feedback for the teacher. They could have a class full of students with no real understanding of the material or, worse, a class full of students who *think* they understand the material but don't.
Obviously, testing, particularly frequent short quizzes, provides feedback for the students as well.
You could separate teaching and testing but have feedback, with the testing company telling the teacher what questions the students did or didn't succeed in answering. Alternatively the professor could give tests intended to give him information but not have them count for grading, could even make them anonymous.
My understanding is that England had something like what you propose, at least before WWII, judging by bits in a Dorothy Sayers novel, that there were examiners who were not faculty at the student's school. I don't know if they still do.
This works only in the sciences and perhaps math, and only for introductory classes. For everything else, there's far too much variation in what the fundamental lessons of the class and field should be.
I once had the misfortune of having a physics teacher who considered reading the textbook adequate instruction in its contents. He assigned a chapter, then lectured solely on advanced topics that derived from the chapter's contents. After a few weeks of this (in a 102 class, mostly nonmajors), I showed up to his office hours to berate him on behalf of the large fraction of the class who were utterly lost. I think he, by the end of the quarter-hour, at least temporarily understood that he needed to teach the basics in his class about the basics. Who knows how long that stuck. And this was at a fairly elite *teaching* school, Reed College (professor likely now retired).
As they say of interviews and hiring processes, so too of classes: almost all the teachers students encounter are terrible, and so they will tend to learn habits which are best suited to terrible teaching. Validity of the converse - that most students you teach are terrible - may vary wildly by school.
When considering the 5% highlighters, consider that the textbook authors are frequently as bad as my physics professor; for much of the textbook , "what [...] the rest of the book is there for" has no sensible answer; it's to pad the page count, or indulge the author, if they even thought it through that much. C.F. Feynman's disgust at the entire slate of available elementary school textbooks, as written up in _What Do You Care What Other People Think?_.
Back when I was teaching computer science (which “The Paper Chase” tells me is quite different from law) I invented an idea I quite liked. I didn’t teach long enough to have a big back-catalog of previous exams, so when I wrote an exam I just gave the students a *heavily* redacted copy of it a few days earlier. It was enough to show them the sorts of skills they would need to solve the problems, but not anything they would be able to do in advance and memorize.
I never heard if they found it helpful or irritating. :-)
Listening vs reading is not mysterious. We evolved to watch and listen in order to learn from others (see Heinrich’s book “The Secret of Our Success”); it is a capability a hundred thousand years old, and we all have it. Reading is less than ten thousand years old and we didn’t really start selecting for it en masse until much more recently, a few centuries perhaps. Relatively few of us manage to get really good at it, just as even fewer get really good at chess.
The mass lecture is not a great substitute for apprenticeship, but it’s still more natural than learning from a book.
Experimental evidence suggests this is false. It's one of the more popular "learning styles" theories that infest education, and they're routinely found to have no predictive validity.
I favor a simple theory which can be heard in any business school: the proper way to convey information is: "Tell them what you're gonna tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them." Or in another dialect: spaced repetition should start with a spacing so small it's immediate.
When I read Maths/CompSci at Cambridge most undergraduates attended the lectures but we also had the tutorials to explain the lectures and to test our knowledge by tying to answer exam like questions
I always tried to take tests without any preparation other than having gone to class. I really wanted to find out how well I had been learning. Some teachers had easy tests, which always disappointed me. Some teachers had such hard tests that I and everyone I knew could only answer maybe half the questions, and I always wondered who they were meant for.
One of my pet theories for changing education is to separate classes and exams. Go to the university, take all the classes you want, as many as you want, as long as you want.
If you want to find out how well you are learning, find a testing company which has a reputation for good thorough exams and doesn't try to prevent or detect cheaters, probably mostly take-home exams.
If you want to convince employers how much you have learned, go to a testing company who takes cheating very seriously. They might even use the same exams, but the testing conditions will be much less conducive to cheating.
But keep all testing out of classes. Make classes all about teaching and learning.
Separating teaching and testing seems like it would eliminate useful feedback for the teacher. They could have a class full of students with no real understanding of the material or, worse, a class full of students who *think* they understand the material but don't.
Obviously, testing, particularly frequent short quizzes, provides feedback for the students as well.
Yes, hadn't thought of that point of view. Thanks. Dang, now I have to think again!
You could separate teaching and testing but have feedback, with the testing company telling the teacher what questions the students did or didn't succeed in answering. Alternatively the professor could give tests intended to give him information but not have them count for grading, could even make them anonymous.
My understanding is that England had something like what you propose, at least before WWII, judging by bits in a Dorothy Sayers novel, that there were examiners who were not faculty at the student's school. I don't know if they still do.
This works only in the sciences and perhaps math, and only for introductory classes. For everything else, there's far too much variation in what the fundamental lessons of the class and field should be.