This is just a local Columbia thing, so I’m posting Sunday night when nobody will read it . . .
Samantha Cooney reports in the Spectator (Columbia’s student newspaper):
Frontiers of Science may be in for an overhaul.
After a year reviewing the course, the Educational Policy and Planning Committee has issued a report detailing its findings and outlining potential ways to make the oft-maligned course more effective. The EPPC’s report, a copy of which was obtained by Spectator, suggests eliminating the lecture portion of the course in favor of small seminars with a standardized curriculum, mirroring other courses in the Core Curriculum.
This seems reasonable to me. It sounds like the seminar portion of the class has been much more successful than the lectures. Once the lectures are removed entirely, perhaps it will allow the students to focus on learning during the seminar periods.
Also, I appreciate that Cooney did a good job quoting me. As I wrote last month, I respect that the organizers of the course did a pre-test, post-test evaluation, but I’m exhausted by all the hype and happytalk around that evaluation in particular and the course more generally. I’m not the world’s greatest teacher so I have a lot of sympathy for organizers of courses that don’t go quite as planned, but I wish they’d be a bit more forthright in admitting their errors—especially for a class that is required of most of the undergraduates.
What’s the basis behind preferring seminars over lectures? I find it very counter intuitive for an introductory course of this sort. Seminars may be fun and less soporific but do they really do learning so much better than lectures?
Eliminating lectures seems a tad too drastic.
In this case the lectures were a disaster, most famously there was the physicist who took off his clothes during class (and, no, he was not teaching anatomy) but more generally there is the difficulty of engaging with actual frontiers of science without adequate preparation. It’s possible but not easy, and the lectures did not have quality control. Also the students generally did not like the lectures (as reported by teaching evaluations).
Just to be clear: My problem with the naked physics lecture was not so much the event itself—we all make mistakes as teachers, and I think it’s a good thing for teachers to have the freedom to make the occasional mistake. Rather, I was unhappy with the way that the Frontiers of Science people reflexively defended the action. Instead of saying, Hey there’s a problem here, they seemed all too quick to insist that the stunt was actually a good idea.
What’s the meaning of “The lectures did not have quality control”? I’m genuinely confused. Do your lectures have “quality control”? How?
I agree that it may not be easy teaching at the frontiers but it doesn’t have to be easy. It’s Columbia after all and not some third tier community college. You probably have the cream of faculty out there. Worst case they can adjust back the frontiers a bit.
I just think it’s silly getting rid of lectures in an Intro course like this one. At that point might as well get rid of the class.
Oh, and if engaging frontiers in lectures is difficult how does switching to Seminars make it any easier? (I will admit I don’t exactly know how these seminars work)
Rahul:
Comparison to my lectures is not the point. My class is not required of most Columbia undergrads, and the students have a clear motivation to take it because of the subject matter. In Frontiers of Science, you have teachers who may well be at the frontiers of research, but that doesn’t help if what they’re doing is showing music videos.
P.S. For more on the Frontiers of Science course in particular, see the outside committee’s report, which seemed very reasonable to me.
Thanks for the report. Looks interesting.
Another point: Eliminating lectures entirely because “students generally did not like the lectures “ sounds like a very strange response to me. Is there a precedent for such a response at Columbia or other places?
Say, students complained they they don’t like exams or homework would we oblige and get rid of those too?
When students give lectures consistently bad evaluations the reasonable response could range from tweaking the content, changing instructors, to modifying the syllabus or similar changes.
But saying “Lets just get rid of lectures” seems mystifyingly incredible.
I think it’s common in high-end expensive schools like Columbia to get a lot more one-on-one or small group discussion than most people are familiar with. This was one thing my sister really liked about going to Reed college for example. So as far as I can tell, they’re suggesting to replace lectures with reading followed by small group discussions of the reading which is consistent with the structure of other courses in the core curriculum. That technique in general is more common in humanities. Read some text, discuss the themes and the historical importance, etc. In science courses we’re used to facts being foremost, and the lectures convey facts. But it doesn’t have to be that way entirely. I could certainly imagine a productive physics course where you choose a high quality text, assign chapters, and then students come to discussions/labs and hash out how to do and analyze experiments, how to interpret equations, what the limits of the models are etc.
Yep. That’s actually pretty much how I teach physics at a small, liberal arts institution (albeit, not a “high-end expensive” one). That way, I can spend class time coaching the students through skill-building and relegate the mere information gathering to the students. As Daniel points out, though, the key is in choosing a good text and thinking very hard about each reading assignment so that they are all managable in the time allotted. It’s a lot more work than lecturing and the students typically offer a lot of resistance early on (e.g., they commonly complain that they are being asked to “teach themselves”), but the outcomes are much better (i.e., better pass rates, higher class averages, higher final exam scores, better scores on standard concept assessments, etc) and most of the students are thanking me by the end of the course.
Incidentally, I find a similar method works pretty well in math classes, too.
Daniel & dab:
Interesting. I’d love to see someone do a formal study of the two methods for early classes.
Perhaps it’s my bias against the non-conventional modes.
Daniel: That’s my understanding of how Oxford and Cambridge do undergrad and some grad programs, including maths. The tutor meets with the students in small groups and someone else sets and marks the exam.
There was increasing concerns about what was being missed by not having lectures, but MOOCs may easily solve all that.
looking briefly at the report you linked below, it does not seem that the lectures were necessarily a disaster, though they did have problems. i think student evaluations are a poor assessment of a class, but it said that “students frequently cite … lectures (and lecturers) as the best aspect of the course, regardless of whether the respondent gives the course as a whole the highest, lowest, or most average rating.” however, i do not have actual statistics on this. also, members of the internal review committee attended lectures and said they were “generally very well crafted, engaging, and informative.”