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This article by Liz Tay in the Australian iTnews highlights the work of Indiana University researcher Lee Sheldon, who’s suggested that employees and teachers may need new systems to motivate their next incoming generation:

Employers: Look to gaming to motivate staff

Sheldon grades his classes on a system similar to World of Warcraft. Students start at Level 1 and zero experience points (XP), and work their way upwards towards mastery. Materially, this system isn’t that different from what’s already out there. The only difference is the viewpoint — top-down or bottom-up?

The vast majority of our school grading systems are based on the idea that a student starts with a perfect score, and works downward from there. Failed tests are a sea of red minus signs and huge X’s. By that definition, the most successful student is the one that has failed the least. Sheldon’s students start from a point of being (functionally) worthless, and slowly work their way up towards mastery.

Real life is closer to Sheldon’s model. And anything that makes school a bit more like real life is okay in my book.

Job descriptions are written in terms of competencies — i.e., “you should be able to do x, y, and z; ability to do a, b, and c is a bonus.” Any extra skills you might have are generally immaterial to the job. I’m a software developer now, and so my ability to juggle is meaningless.

I kind of wish I was still teaching, so I could try out Sheldon’s scheme. For example, I’d consider defining grades in terms of competencies, rather than points on a test. Consider grading a unit on Newton’s laws. What if the expectations, presented at the beginning of the unit, looked like this?

A student will receive a grade of D upon: (1) reciting Newton’s three laws, and (2) giving an example of each.

A student will receive a grade of C upon: achieving the requirements for a grade of D, and (3) solving basic force problems using Newton’s second law in one dimension.

A student will receive a grade of B upon: achieving the requirements for a grade of C, and (4) solving basic force problems using forces at right angles using Newton’s second law in two dimensions.

A student will receive a grade of A upon: achieving the requirements for a grade of B, and (5) solving complex force problems involving four or more forces at any angles in two dimensions.

A test would become five questions, corresponding to the numbered entries above. (Or maybe 15 questions, three for each item. The student “passes” that competency if (s)he gets at least two of three right.)

Optimistically, this system gets rid of grade inflation. Numerical grades tend to be relative to one another, and the entire class can swing up or down (usually up) as a whole. At the end of the quarter, what does a grade of ‘90′ mean? Not much.

If you’re an overachieving student, an average of 97 doesn’t tell you anything about your absolute proficiency at the subject. And worse, it dissuades you from learning even more, since the system says that you’re already at the top of the scale. Why bother?

Sheldon’s system may even result in students choosing “majors” in high school. For those who have a good sense of what their career would bring them, this isn’t a bad thing in the least. I knew I hated literature and history from a young age, and I loved math and science. What if I could direct my energy in really excelling in those fields, while attaining lesser mastery in those fields in which I had no interest? In fact, why even bother having a maximum grade? Students who can analyze literature four grade levels above their chronological grade level should be rewarded for doing so.

I don’t expect schools to take on something like this. Ironically I think parents and administrators like the fluid nature of grades. Grades can be easily manipulated and are quite subjective. Teachers and students can attempt to “explain away” the reason for a particular grade penalty. (E.g., “this question wasn’t perfectly fair,” “I talked about it in class but it wasn’t in the textbook,” “you didn’t get enough partial credit,” et cetera.)

Sheldon’s grading system would expose the disparity in achievement across genders and races. And it would show that students with learning and mental disabilities are actually not able to keep up with their peers, which is a politically incorrect result (even if it is, in most cases, true).

What do you think? Paradigm shift? Or a new way of looking at the same problem?

Slashdot today has news that the Commonwealth of Virginia is going to begin producing its own open-source physics textbook.

This is fantastic news. I’m a big fan of Creative Commons, and I love the entire concept of the license. While I respect an author’s right to recognition and profit from her work, I also believe that most works that we produce that are copyrightable should not be. These blog posts, for example, are copyrightable by me, but I choose to release them under a Creative Commons license because I’m writing for fun.

While textbook authors spend countless hours editing their books and producing unique content, ultimately the knowledge they are spreading is not unique. When stripped of bells and whistles, most physics books contain exactly the same ideas. Why then must we pay for this content, if it can be obtained from anywhere? What if there were a large international network of computers that could hold the information?

I firmly believe that in the age of the Internet there’s absolutely no reason why anyone with motivation and a network connection cannot learn anything they want for free.

Last year I volunteered some of my time to do a little bit of writing for Wikibooks, the open-source textbook arm of the Wikimedia Foundation. I worked on the Physics With Calculus wikibook, particularly the Scalar and Vector Quantities, The SI Unit System, and Motion In One Dimension chapters.

There’s an open source science textbook project called, appropriately, Free High School Science Texts, running out of the University of Cape Town in South Africa. I’ve been meaning to contact these folks for a while and toss my physics hat into the ring, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

In reading these texts so far, I can come up with one word that accurately describes them all. Boring. Even my own writing — it’s hard to come up with personality in writing when you’re trying to match others’ style. And face it — text is easy to write. Beautiful pictures or illustrative movies are time- and sometimes cost-intensive to produce.

Most high-school level texts are at best unexciting, and at worst boring. It would seem that the lower level of mathematics required would allow authors to have a bit more “fun” in their presentation, but perhaps this “fun” would spell the death of the book in the eyes of a school board’s textbook adoption committee. Paul Hewitt’s Conceptual Physics has been a success not just because of Hewitt’s fine artwork, but because of his conversational tone and his casual presentation.

Ironically, the college texts that include more mathematics are usually a lot more fun. A personal favorite of mine is Eugene Hecht’s book (aptly named Physics). It provides classical proofs as well as modern realizations of simple physics concepts. While not completely accessible to all students, most average to advanced first-year physics students would be served well by Dr. Hecht’s book.

The key to a good physics book is the problems. The end-of-chapter problems must exhibit a large variety of subjects and difficulties. Physics takes practice, and students who are invested in their practice will succeed. Students who are subjected to boring, too-simple or too-complex problems will not enjoy physics.

While I love Hecht’s work, I really want to put him out of business. Hecht has made money on his books, I’m sure. But the real profit goes to the publishing houses that print these books. The books are beautifully printed, and all that comes at a cost. The textbook manufacturers make nothing on the dissemination of information — their job is to sell glossy-paged tomes to students or school districts trapped into using them.

Best of luck to Virginia’s effort. I’d love to see this succeed and carry over to mathematics and other sciences. I’d be participating in the project, but it looks for now that it’s only open to Virginia classroom teachers. That’s too bad — while I understand Virginia’s desire to keep their work “in-house”, on the Internet state (and national) borders don’t exist.

Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that “Everyone has the right to education.” We now have the technology to rapidly disseminate fundamental ideas, whereas we once did not. We must use this gift to train the next generation.

Brian Greene (the physicist, not David from 90210) has written an op-ed column in the New York Times. Read it.

Put a Little Science In Your Life (Free registration required, or not.)

To excerpt the article:

As every parent knows, children begin life as uninhibited, unabashed explorers of the unknown. From the time we can walk and talk, we want to know what things are and how they work — we begin life as little scientists. But most of us quickly lose our intrinsic scientific passion. And it’s a profound loss.

…

But most of these studies (and their suggestions) avoid an overarching systemic issue: in teaching our students, we continually fail to activate rich opportunities for revealing the breathtaking vistas opened up by science, and instead focus on the need to gain competency with science’s underlying technical details.

Dr. Greene sums up in few words that which all science teachers know, consciously or unconsciously.

Watching elementary school children doing science is fascinating. They scream out when they see paramecia through a microscope’s eyepiece. Their fascination is palpable when they look into the sky and see stars, galaxies, and planets.

Find the exact same students in eleventh and twelfth grade. With a few exceptions, that wonder is completely gone. Science is just another class in which they work as hard as they can to do as little as possible. (Of course, my students are exceptions.)

Why does science go from being the favorite subject to the most hated?

I teach in New York State, which has a statewide curriculum set forth by the New York State Board of Regents, a division of the State University of New York. The goal of the Regents program is to unify the concepts taught across the state. This has been largely successful — the Great State of New York consistently sits atop lists of states providing the best education.

Some subjects, such as Physics, are very broad and shallow. Ultimately, students are tested on their ability to solve very simple problems involving substituting variables into equations. Others, such as Earth Science, require incredibly detailed knowledge — but the test really only requires reading graphs and charts from the state-supplied reference table.

Most teachers of Regents subjects just barely get through their broad yet shallow curriculum each year, leaving little time for the “niceties” of science. Certainly, in many cases that’s poor planning on the teacher’s behalf. And an effective teacher can convey quite a bit of nature’s mystery in every lecture, regardless of the topic-of-the-day.

How can we restore the fascination that students have seeing things for the first time? Is science worth studying if it’s boring?

Wonder needs to be built into the curriculum in the first place. What’s wrong with including cosmology, quantum physics, and relativity into the mix? Sure, these topics are difficult, but if discussed qualitatively the ideas are within reach of high school students.

If the curriculum becomes more exciting and more interesting, all students’ interest and performance will significantly improve.

We should ditch the dry, boring introductory physics texts we have. We need to make courses that focus a little more on the appreciation of science and less on the dull mechanics of manipulating meaningless numbers. These courses would be academically less rigorous (and therefore a hard-sell politically), but could serve to reinvigorate the public with respect to science. This should also reinvigorate teachers — now we can show students just why we think science is the bee’s knees.

I studied physics not because I could solve equations well or because I had a good high school physics teacher. I chose to study physics because I was fascinated by special relativity, quantum physics, and “spooky action at a distance“. Only once I was completely engrossed in studying physics did I see the beauty inherent in the “first principles”.

Not everyone can (or should) be a scientist. But citizens in our technological world need to be intelligent consumers of science. They should be able to think critically as to what is possible and what isn’t. They should gain the perspective of being a tiny piece of a mind-bogglingly large universe. They should appreciate the human impact on nature. Schools will never be able to give science the appreciation it deserves until students are exposed to the excitement of science.

So how do we get started?

(Thanks to Swans On Tea for highlighting Greene’s article.)

I’ve been putting off writing this post for at least a month now; hence the reason for little new content.

I’ve decided to leave teaching.

My major reason for changing jobs is that I have bills to pay and would like to start a family soon. I can’t do that on a (Catholic school) teacher’s salary, and so I’ve been seeking other things.

After a very short job search I found a position that’s pretty much perfect for me — I’m going to be working as a programmer in a physics group at a major corporate research center. The particular project I’ll be working on has medical applications, and so I can sleep at night knowing that I’m doing good things to help society. I’ve always felt like I missed working in physics in any real capacity, and this will certainly give me my opportunity to be part of a team doing some solid science. I have a great deal to learn and I’m looking forward to the opportunity.

As a result of going back into corporate life, I’m hoping to have some more free time for personal projects. I love the entire concept of Open Course Ware (OCW) and would like to pursue projects in which I create physics content for all. Certainly, this blog is part of that effort, and hopefully the posts will become more frequent rather than less.

I don’t intend to make this my permanent good-bye from education. I’m going to maintain my AAPT membership and hope to attend some meetings in the near future. After four years in the classroom I feel that I finally have a pretty good sense of the goings-on at a school and how the various players (parents, teachers, administrators, and of course, students) fit together. I will continue to follow the world of education, and hope to contribute to physics education from outside the classroom.

Many thanks to all I’ve worked with in my past four years — colleagues, administrators, parents, and most especially, students. I have learned so much from all of you. These experiences will stay with me for the rest of my life, and I will be forever grateful for the gifts you have given me.

Inside Higher Ed has a piece today on one professor’s rebellion to students texting in his class: he just walks out.

Professor Laurence Thomas of Syracuse University will end class immediately and retire to his office if he sees even one student send a text message during class.

For current college students, text messaging is like breathing — you don’t think twice. While texting may be disrespectful to the instructor, it is specifically not disrespectful to the other students.

What if a message really does need to be sent? Is banging out a quick text better or worse than making a ten-second phone call from one’s seat? What about the commotion of excusing oneself to talk on the phone outside the lecture hall?

Professor Thomas, sir? Get over yourself. Yes, texting is disrespectful. So is doodling, daydreaming, whispering during class, chewing gum in public, and wearing white after Labor Day. The idea of respect is relative, defined by the social and cultural norms of the environment. While it is the professor’s right to ask disrespectful students to leave his class, it is also his job to provide the services his students are paying for.

The students are the consumers of education. If they don’t think texting is rude in class, then it’s not. Plain and simple. Texting doesn’t take away from other students’ experiences, and so if a student wishes to divert her attention to another task for a few seconds it is her prerogative.

As a teacher in a private high school, I have more power than some of my public-school peers to deal with discipline problems on the spot. At my school, cell phones are to be stored in lockers and powered off during the day — if a teacher sees or hears a phone at any time, it is confiscated until a parent can pick it up.

In a high school, this makes sense — students need practice in giving their full attention to their instructor. Besides, they’re required to go to class anyway (as much for legal reasons as educational) so they might as well attend mentally as well as physically.

In a university environment, students can sleep late if they wish and miss class entirely. If a student chooses to be 97% present, isn’t that also their right?