Posts Tagged ‘research papers’
Undergraduate Students’ feedback for current semester method
Posted by: adonis49 on: November 2, 2008
- In: auto-biography | Diaries | education methods/programs | Essays | Lebanon/Middle East/Near East/Levant | professional articles
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Article #24, (written on June 11, 2005. Teaching at LAU Byblos university, Lebanon)
After many unsuccessful attempts to generate students’ feedback on my teaching methods and how this course might affect their perspective and behavior in approaching the remaining core courses, before graduation and in their career I decided to include two questions in the final exam that I expected would shed some insight.
The required question, which I told class two weeks ahead of the final exam that it will be part of the exam, directed the students to focus first on the diligent A and B students and then to target the C and D students in their teaching methods in case they might have to teach a course in Human Factors in engineering.
The third part was to restructure the course materials and which chapters should have to be developed further.
Now, any logical person would expect the students to have prepared detailed answers to these questions since it is an open book and open notes exam, but unfortunately, I didn’t have any shred of evidence that any student did prepare a written answer.
You would also expect students to be lenient in teaching this course but their reaction was even harsher.
Students feedbacks required that drop quizzes be delivered on a weekly basis after students hand in a chapter summary, that case studies be debated in class, a few lab workshops and many more assignments.
A student suggested attaching a CD copy of the course material so that they would not have to carry books.
They suggested that summarizing chapters as assignments might force students to read, a suggestion that I did try in a previous semester but was discouraged because the endeavor ended up with students heavily copying from one another, and I having to carry home heavy loads and wasting more time flipping through useless pages.
I think that frequent and consistent drop quizzes are an excellent tool although it will cost me dear time for grading and from teaching time.
Actually, I didn’t expect even the most diligent students to read the whole course materials.
I provided hints and suggestions on the best way to assimilate the material that would help them navigate through the content of the course.
I encouraged them to browse through the whole course contents and focus on the graphs, tables and figures and try to comprehend the subject matters by analyzing and using them as facts in their analyses.
May be you would have a better assessment of the students’ harsh requirements, if given the opportunity to teaching, after I expose the load they shouldered throughout the semester.
Besides the mid-term and final exams, each student had to submit two assignments, two lengthy lab projects; three extensive take home exams that covered most of the chapters, three quizzes for 45 minutes each, two presentations to class of graphs, tables and figures, reading revised articles that I assigned them and a take home exam on a research paper concerning hand tool design.
Not a single student was exposed to a research paper before, and it was a pretty tough awakening for the students planning for higher education. (Actually, the administration promised to sign in for peered-reviewed research articles from the Human Factors society, but never delivered)
I think that the students lacked an appreciation of the time allocated to managing a class that prohibits many well meaning teaching plans.
In many instances, I had to read in class the assignments and take home exams questions and provide directions because I noticed that the students tended to dig these assignments up from their folders before a long lapse of time.
The time allocated for students’ presentation takes up more than a third of the teaching hour and fielding questions takes the best of the second third
There are no lab credit hours for this course and still students believe that they can set aside free hours for doing lab projects necessary for assimilating this course.
The alternatives restructuring of the course materials did not differ much from mine.
The optional question for bonus points asked the students to select 3 topics of interest to them, provide catchy titles and explain in two paragraphs for each topic how it might apply and improve their careers.
Although I have assigned to the students articles that I wrote as an introduction to the course materials only one student offered complete sentence titles; the rest just named the topics.
It appears that their preferred topics were: risk and errors, designing interfaces, work environmental factors that might affect performance, human-computer interface and hand tool design.
A couple students interested in medical technology engineering wanted more emphasis on the biology aspects of the body structure.
Only one student mentioned the cognitive preference for this single course.
Many students signed petitions to re-include the elective course of “risk assessment and occupational safety and health” for the fall semester but the administration refused to consider these petitions two years in a row.
Why? I still did not receive any feedback either written or verbal.
It appears that the meaning of asking students to deliver petitions for any demand is less a matter for taking their cases seriously but to erect roadblocks and present a procedural façade to secure grants as a professional institution.
Actually, students’ apathy toward the effectiveness of the student council is strikingly telling.
I had to harangue my class to grab and snatch their rights by persistent pressure on the administration for the demands in their petitions.
Compensation: An Experimental mind
I recall my advisor telling me once in frustration “At your age I was professor and had raised a family”. He had two grown up sons and a daughter who just got married. I didn’t need this reminder to comprehend my desperate situation: I am just plainly stubborn with no imaginations on earning money. These long years in a PhD program in the specialty of Human Factors, at the age 35 to 41, should be considered a waste of time for any career-minded student but they were valuable for my mind. My exposure to the methods and vocabulary of five other different fields of study in psychology, business, marketing, economics, and education permit me to think that I acquired an experimental mind, a mind that not many could claim to explicitly have. I was exposed to various experimental designs, not necessarily cause and effects designs, and inevitably to different statistical results and interpretations. I witnessed graduates focusing on the technicality of terms and so many “point statistics” that basically means nothing, and a fortiori meant nothing in the minds of the graduates but their experimental minds were lacking in comprehension. The end result is millions of graduates publishing papers not valid scientifically and unable to interpret results.
When someone asks “how” (the mechanical process or procedure) it is tacitly understood that he comprehend the why and what of the subject matter or the system; that he knows all the factors and variables that may affect the outcome of a system, including the human element within the system. Maybe a practicing or a professional knows his particular system, (he should though implicitly most of the times, as engineers learn), but the fundamental question remains “has he acquired the generalized method and rationality to investigating systems outside his discipline?”
I know what I am talking about but the difficulty is to express and disseminate the problem. I have taught engineers who had no understanding for discriminating among variables such as dependent, independent, or controlling variables; you think that they implicitly know how to differentiate among the variables; wrong, they don’t. Even after three sessions coupled with examples they were still in the dark and still wondering what is all the fuss about. You think that they can interpret graphs, extract wealth of information and comprehend pages of written materials from one meaningful graph, they generally cannot. I can testify that 30% of my engineer classes could not read; another 30% could not understand what they read. It was a pleasure to educate a couple of good minds. I have written several articles on that subject in my category “Professional articles” for further detailed clarification.
Worst, undergraduates are almost never exposed to research papers. Most Master’s graduates barely comprehend or interpret correctly research papers. Graduates join the “work force” of the rational minds practically illiterate; they cannot resume any continuation learning programs for a simple reason: they are illiterate in reading and comprehending research papers.
My contention is this. If you acquired an experimental mind then you should be eligible to comprehend any field of study by reading the research papers in the field. The major contraption devised my professions to discriminate among one another is a flimsy mask targeted in changing the technical terms and vocabulary; a secret ritual inherited from ancient times to creating castes of literates. Other than that, the experimental methodology is fundamentally the same. When you acquire an experimental mind then all disciplines are one course away; you need to learn the slang, a new language that sound familiar, but with terms that have different meanings and connotations. The ultimate goal of teaching is for every university graduating mind to be trained to comprehend research papers of other disciplines.
May I refer the reader to my current article “Rationality Fraud: Can our leading minds pass Socrates’ dialogue test?”
Adonis Diaries 