Over a cup of coffee: September 30th edition

The Teaching Professor gives Powerpoint Do's and Don'ts.

Faculty Focus reports on student recommendations for encouraging participation.

Tomorrow's Professor Blog encourages us to find ways to help students answer their own questions.

Prof Hacker gets us thinking about how we can use mid-term evaluations to improve our courses.

James Lang in his Chronicle of Higher Education blog challenges us to make teaching resolutions for the new year

Brown University's Digital Collections organizes large collections of African American sheet music, Napoleonic satires, and World War I sheet music.

Geogebra comes into focus as a online and offline tool for teaching geometry, calculus, probability, and more. Take a look at their instructional examples.

Causeweb provides an method for introducing estimations to students using the German Tank problem.

Using Online Concept Mapping with Peer Learning to Enhance Concept Application

In a recent study, Chang & Chang (2008) found that students in an online course who used concept maps as a learning strategy improved their ability to apply a theory to a real world scenario (2008).

Concept maps are diagrams that can be created using tools such as pen and paper, post it notes, or computer software. A concept map involves nodes that are linked together by relationships. Each node represents a concept such as "viral marketing," "Greek philosophy," or "energy conservation." Each relationship represents a relationship between two nodes such as "affects the population," "was influenced by," or "being developed by."

Concept maps were used in the experimenter's course that covered learning theory. They were implemented to help achieve the learning goal of organizing and giving structure to multiple theories of learning and how the theories related to scenarios that the students would face in future learning environments.

In this experiment, two conditions were formed, students who were required to use concept maps throughout the class and those who did not. The research team assessed student learning by grading assignments that demonstrated concept application in the learning theory domain; using a rubric following the categories of (Chang & Chang, 2005, p.20):

1. Instructional strategies were clearly described and appropriate for the given learners to achieve the learning goal
2. The instructional strategies were consistent with the concepts of the given learning theory
3. The rationale for using the instructional strategy was logical and consistent with theory

Researchers found that students who had used concept maps had statistically significant higher scores on their concept application assignments than those who did not. While the research team admits that this could be due to a number of experimental biases, most notably that those in the control condition did not have any additional instructional techniques applied, the results do warrant further study of concept mapping as an instructional strategy.

With that in mind, we provide some links to concept maps and examples of how they might be applied in a course.

Resources

How to make a concept map
List of concept mapping software from Penn State University

Concept Map Examples:

• British Romantic Literature
• History of Life
• Hong Kong's Legal Framework

References

Chang, S., & Chang, Y. (2008, Spring2008). USING ONLINE CONCEPT MAPPING WITH PEER LEARNING TO ENHANCE CONCEPT APPLICATION. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 9(1), 17-27. Retrieved September 29, 2009, from Professional Development Collection database.

Over a cup of coffee: September 23rd edition

The first Teaching Commons Discussion and Workshop Series is this Friday September 25th! Featuring Dr. Darsie Bowden (FYW/WRD) presenting on Reading Strategies: Helping Students Read Effectively. Lincoln Park and Loop locations available. Sign up now.

Inside Higher Ed. posts a great article on how to adjust when a class starts to go bad.

The Vanderbilt Center for Teaching provides a helpful site on how to gather in class feedback from your students during the middle of the quarter.

The Tomorrow's Professor Blog posts on Inclusive Teaching Strategies to Promote Non-Traditional Student Success.

Learning @ Georgetown discusses scholarship of teaching and learning activities in which Dr. Jim Sandefur of the Department of Mathematics uses video tape to uncover common student misconceptions.

The Times in the UK create The Times 100: A Student and Teacher Business Resource Centre.

Over a cup of coffee: September 16th edition

The IDD Blog posts on Two Tools for Finding Old Web Pages, including The Internet Archive and iCyte.

Diary of a University President by Ferdinand von Prondzynski, President of Dublin City University, Ireland remembers Michel de Montaigne, the man who developed the essay into a literary genre.

The Teaching Professor posts on dealing with “free riders” in group work.

The Academic Commons, “a community of faculty, academic technologists, librarians, administrators, and other academic professionals” posts on a student project called War News Radio, social networking for inorganic chemistry, and doing history with digital tools.

The Philosopher’s Eye is featured. “The aim of the site is to provide regular thought-provoking coverage of real-world events with a critical, philosophical eye.”

Problem-based Learning in Quantitative Classes

Problem based learning (PBL) is a strategy that engages students by using current problems in the world in class assignments. This helps students become invested in course assignments and teaches them problem solving skills that are required of professionals.

In the spring 2009 issue of Academic Exchange Quarterly Blaylock and Kopf (2009) present an example of how we can implement PBL in our classroom.

In a quantitative analysis course, Blaylock and Kopf prompted their class with the following statement from the 2008 presidential campaign. In the statement, then presidential candidate Obama speaks on the energy savings and long term lowered fuel costs gained from proper tire inflation.


After viewing the statement as a class, they presented the overarching question in a manner that reached students on a personal level: “Will this part of Mr. Obama's energy plan cause the price you and I pay for gas to decline?”

After some initial discussion Blaylock and Kopf challenged students to defend their positions by asking, “How do you know?”

This lead into the larger assignment which asked students to consider:

1. What information do you need to know to evaluate the accuracy of Mr. Obama's statement?


2. What primary or secondary data support your claims?


3. How can you use the data to support your claims?

These questions required students to consider new challenges such as developing an experimental design, assessing appropriate sample sizes, finding representative sample populations, and organizing and analyzing a new set of data.

Throughout this process Blaylock and Kopf supported students through short lectures and guidance to individual groups.

While many students felt that the practical application allowed students to better understand statistical concepts, some felt that the topic had already been over analyzed and their data was irrelevant. Overall, Blaylock and Kopf felt that PBL engaged students in the course material at a much deeper level than if they had simply used text book examples.

References

Blaylock, B. K., & Kopf, J. M. (2009). Problem-Based Learning in Quantitative Classes. Academic Exchange Quarterly, 13(1). Retrieved September 10, 2009, from http://www.rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/cho4258w9.htm.