Jul

2

Calculus vs. Probability & Statistics

July 2, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | Leave a Comment

As many know, there are ongoing committees in both the Weissman and Zicklin Schools working toward improving the quantitative skills of our undergraduates. A central question I’ve heard in both committees is how much calculus, probability and statistics an undergraduate college student should study. On this point, Harvey Mudd College mathematician Arthur Benjamin argued for much more of the latter at this year’s TED conference. I am not necessarily endorsing nor agreeing; just sharing…

www.ted.com/talks/arthur_benjamin_s_formula_for_changing_math_education.html (3 minutes)

Jul

1

Not Seeing the War For the Battles

July 1, 2009 | by glennpetersen | 3 Comments

The following is a portion of a letter to the editor that appeared in the June 15, 2009 NY Times. It addresses purported changes in the ways history is taught, but it is rooted in a larger perspective I have encountered many times and I bring it to our blog as a springboard to raise a few underlying pedagogical questions.

“During the 1980s, I taught United States history to American soldiers stationed in South Korea. In one fairly typical class, not one of the students had heard of the Battle of Gettysburg. Perhaps their high school teachers considered the subject a mere matter of military history. But most of the people who fought and died at Gettysburg were ordinary Americans, and our lives would be very different now if the ones wearing blue had stayed home.”

A number of assumptions here are worth questioning. What first leaps out at me is the notion that if students seem not to recognize a topic, or don’t respond to questions about it, it is ipso facto clear that they don’t know anything about it and that they weren’t taught about the subject. I’m really quite flummoxed by these assumptions.

Students refrain from expressing familiarity with a topic for a great many reasons. In addition to the straightforward proposition that they indeed don’t know anything about it, there are oh so many other possibilities. It may be because they’re shy about participating in discussions; because they don’t remember clearly what they were taught; because they’re uncertain about how what they recall will be received by the instructor or fellow students; because there’s tension between what they learned and what they believe; or because of any other of a host of social and/or interpersonal dynamics in the classroom. To conclude that students don’t know about something simply because they don’t readily respond to questions about it is to misunderstand the social milieu of one’s own classroom.

It equally the case that students often don’t recall what they’ve learned until a context for the topic is fleshed out. As the subject is discussed and elaborated upon, gradual recognition and recollection may bring it slowly back to mind.

Students, of course, do forget much they’ve been taught. It’s unlikely that most students could recapitulate everything that’s been covered in a single class period, let alone an entire semester. The fact that students claim not to recall something is a very poor guide to whether they’ve ever been taught it.

The Battle of Gettysburg is remembered primarily because of the speech President Lincoln made to consecrate the memorial there. Without downplaying its size and significance, I nevertheless point out that it was only one battle out of many fought during the Civil War, and that ordinary Americans fought in them all. It strikes me as odd that knowledge about a single battle would be used as evidence of ignorance about the meaning of an entire war.

Finally, my own operating principle is that if students don’t know (or remember) something that I think is important, it’s my job to figure out how to teach it to them in such a way that they will remember it, rather than rail at them for not knowing it.

Jun

16

Citing Sources in Slide Presentation

June 16, 2009 | by Stephen Francoeur | 7 Comments

A student I was helping at the reference desk recently asked me to examine a slide presentation he and a classmate were working on for an assignment. On one slide, there appeared a bulletted item that was clearly not written by the students. When I mentioned to the student that she should consider putting quote marks around the quotation and in some fashion identify the source, she seemed completely nonplussed, as though there was no need to indicate in this slide medium content which material was written by others. That got me to thinking that I haven’t really seen any guidelines or best practices about how to indicate in a slide that text or ideas came from another source.

I’m curious to hear what sort of advice instructors give to students about citing sources for slide presentations. While it easy to envision a final slide that is a reference list, it seems to be trickier to develop best practices for identifying sources in slides that make up the main part of a presentation. Should you use numbered notes? An author-date notation set in parentheses? A source note at the bottom of the slide? To what extent can the rules that are delineated in the major style guides (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.) be applied to slide presentations? Do these rules, which were created to support the needs of scholars writing books, articles, and reports, work well in a medium like slide presentations, where there is a great deal of flexibility in the way text can be presented?

May

6

Protesting Blackboard 8.0

May 6, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | 11 Comments

This post is being written in response to the unreliability of Blackboard 8.0—outages, slowness and bugs, oh my! Are we beta testing? Some didn’t realize how dependent we’ve become upon Blackboard until it went down for three consecutive days in mid March 2009.

As I hear rumors that Blackboard is likely to remain unreliable with periodic outages, I’ve quietly been setting up workarounds so the show can go on. Below are some of my tricks; apologies for undoubtedly provoking the ire of some of my friends in corporate IT. And Kevin Wolff in BCTC, everyone says you are a miracle worker. Seriously. Thanks from all of us in the faculty.

Question 1: True or false? Baruch offers a service so you can post items on the web, even when Blackboard is down.

True!

Faculty can sign up for their own blog with Baruch’s Bernard L. Schwartz Communications Institute (the sponsors of this blog). The blogs are easily formatted to have the look and feel of a web page (example). Post away! (Another option is the eReserve.)

Question 2: True or false? When Blackboard is down and you want to post a giant file, you can send emails with large attachments (say, up to 1 gigabyte) for free?

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Apr

22

Who Put Your Exam on the Web?

April 22, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | 6 Comments

The year was 1997. During a graduate school take-home exam in abstract algebra, one of my fellow students emailed the questions to AskDrMath.com and received answers before the exam was due.

Fast forward to 2005. One of my international graduate students showed me a website hosted in his home country (in a language not based on the Roman alphabet, therefore not easily searched by most westerners). Students post homework, exams, and solutions for many North American universities, indexed by class and professor.

I was happy to see that the Wall Street Journal wrote about these issues in their 9-April-2009 article “Do Study Sites Make the Grade?” by A.M. Chaker, pp. D1-D2. [1] If you aren’t aware, online study sites give students access to homeworks and exams posted by hundreds of thousands of registered users. They are the old sorority/fraternity files in the Internet age. According to the article, solutions to 225 textbooks are also now on the web. Furthermore, students post and answer questions from fellow users around the globe.

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Apr

13

Did You Teach to Each?

April 13, 2009 | by Elisabeth Gareis | 3 Comments

In a recent article in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, Kolb and Joy (2009) investigated whether there are cultural differences in learning styles. Kolb’s Learning Style Inventory (LSI) was tested on participants from seven nations. The inventory provides scores for two dimensions: (1) from abstract conceptualization to concrete experience and (2) from active experimentation to reflective observation.

The following cultural factors were found to impact learning styles. Collectivism, future orientation, and gender egalitarianism correlated with a preference for abstract conceptualization over concrete experience. The effect of culture was significant. The seven nations are situated on the scale as follows:

conceptualization

A preference for reflective observation over active experimentation was correlated with the cultural factors of uncertainty avoidance and assertiveness; the effect, however, was only marginal. Age and area of specialization had more impact.

The authors argue that, in the first years of higher education, before discipline-specific conditioning has taken root, culture-based differences may be especially pronounced, and that instructors should make sure to design learning situations that take into account cultural differences in learning styles.

How do you teach to each?

References:

Joy, S., & Kolb, D. A. (2009). Are there cultural differences in learning style? International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 33(1), 69-85.

For descriptions of commonly cited cultural dimensions, see Hofstede and Trompenaars/Hampden-Turner.

Mar

29

Mentoring Graduate Students

March 29, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | Leave a Comment

Some of us mentor doctoral students. I had a positive experience as a student, but I understand from others that there can be a great deal of variance in the quality of the relationship from the points of view of both the professor and student. There’s apparently so much variance that the graduate student senate of which I was a member from 2000-2004 published a “how-to” guide (”A Mentoring Guidebook for Faculty: helping graduate students grow into respected professionals and trusted colleagues”; pdf; general webpage). It is with their gracious permission that I am posting the above links for others who might benefit. The authors tell me that their guide is an adaptation of those of Michigan (”How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Guide for Faculty at a Diverse University“) and Univ. of Washington (”How to Mentor Graduate Students: A Faculty Guide“). Of interest?

Mar

22

Guest Post: Orpheus in the Businessworld ossia Thinking Outside the Box

March 22, 2009 | by Leah Schanke | 1 Comment

The following is a guest post from Dennis Slavin, Associate Provost for Faculty Development at Baruch College. He can be reached at Dennis.Slavin@baruch.cuny.edu.

About ten years ago the (then) executive director of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Harvey Seifter, approached me with a novel idea: a residency for Orpheus at Baruch College. Those of you who know about the longtime residency here of the Alexander String Quartet might question the novelty, but this was a different concept. Instead of bringing music to arts and science classes and demonstrating links-to classical or romantic styles, or to narrative techniques or mathematical relationships etc.-the idea was to have business students sit in on an actual Orpheus rehearsal.

If you don’t know Orpheus, my point is obscure. Orpheus is an orchestra that functions (wonderfully) without a conductor. The idea was (and still is) to demonstrate the actual working of a “flat management system” in real time. There’s nothing staged: these are real rehearsals for upcoming performances. Sitting in on these sessions, we heard many serious discussions about significant matters of interpretation; there were lots of conflicts, lots of resolutions, and lots of lessons to be learned by our MBA students.

Ten years on, Orpheus continues to be in residence with our MBA program and honors undergraduates. I haven’t been involved in years, but the Zicklin School keeps asking them back.

Mar

17

How elite are we?

March 17, 2009 | by Will Millhiser | 6 Comments

Did you see “Disadvantages of an Elite Education” (American Scholar, 2008) in which former Yale professor William Deresiewicz contrasts the education at Yale and Cleveland State, an inner-city university much like Baruch? The article was unexpectedly thought provoking. For example, consider this:

“[S]tudents at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.

“That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy.”

It’s not that I agree with all the arguments in the essay, but Deresiewicz asks an important question: where do you fall on the spectrum of “indifferent” to “pampering”? The essay also gives one newfound appreciation for our students.

There was another recent attack on the elite colleges—Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Chris Hedges’ 9-Dec-2008 essay “The Best and the Brightest Have Led America Off a Cliff“—but skip it if you are looking for uplifting news.

Read more

Mar

11

A+ . . . Despite Heavy Accent

March 11, 2009 | by Elisabeth Gareis | 10 Comments

Question: A student gives a presentation. He has a heavy foreign accent and is at times incomprehensible. Overall, the speech seems well researched and on target. What do you do?

a. Give him an A.

b. Subtract points for incomprehensibility and give him a B.

c. Tell him that the presentation was unacceptable and that he should improve his oral communication proficiency.

Instructors cite a variety of reasons (often with a kernel of truth) why they let incomprehensibility slide:

1. “Asking a student to reduce his/her accent is embarrassing and discouraging.” — It is true that accents are windows to our identity, and that a student changing his/her accent may experience a tangible sense of loss or feel repercussions from home culture friends and family.

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