Diversity in learning

Once I figure out how to do it, I’ll be reorganizing the list of links and adding Seth’s blog, but, in the meantime, here’s a fascinating article on diversity in learning, where Seth describes a class assignment where he let students do whatever they wanted:

I [Seth] taught a class called Psychology and the Real World where the off-campus work essentially was the
course. Students could do any off-campus work related to psychology – at least 60 hours of it during the 15-week semester. In addition, we met weekly for discussions and the students wrote three short papers. Eight students signed up. Their off-campus work was learning how to be a mediator, developing a television show about happiness, working at a shelter for battered women, working at a nursing home, talking with patients in a mental hospital for the criminally insane, taking care of two-year-old twins, tutoring high-school students, and making bereavement support calls. It was time well-spent.

I had a few thoughts:

1. This sounded a lot better than the class on left-handedness that Seth and I taught 12 years ago. The students liked the class OK but they certainly didn’t do anything substantial on their own. But, even then, I recall Seth telling me that he thought a big problem with college courses, as they were usually configured, is that they have the goal of making the student as much like the instructor (or the textbook) as possible. It’s a rare class where students’ differing experiences and talents are appreciated. (One rare positive example among my own classes is my seminar with Shigeo, where it really works well that different students have different knowledge bases about political science. But in other classes it’s been hard to make use of students’ diversity.)

2. It’s funny that only 8 students signed up, out of the 20,000 undergraduates at UC Berkeley. Setting aside selection issues, it sounds like at least a few more students would’ve benefited. But I have to say that it’s hard to get good attendance in a non-required course. I recall that Mike Jordan said that he gets an enrollment of 125 in his Bayesian statistics course at Berkeley, which seems pretty impressive–I certainly don’t get 125 in my classes here–but maybe it’s required.

3. I somehow expect that this course wouldn’t work so well if I \–or almost anyone else–were teaching it. Part of this is that Seth knows a lot about psychology, but it’s also something about working with students. When I’ve tried to have students do open-ended projects, they’ve almost always done something pretty uninteresting (see Section 11.4.3 in Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks for more on this). I remember discussing this with Seth several years ago. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Students generally pick uninteresting topics, skimp on the real work of data collection, and avoid any kind of random sampling or even systematic design, so I’m thinking I have to give them more structure, a better list of project topics, maybe assign them to projects.

Seth: Try giving them less structure and see what they come up with.

It seems that Seth’s suggestion has worked–for him. I’ll give it a try. But I still think I’ll have to check their ideas and rule out the worst, such as comparisons of GPA’s of athletes and nonatheletes, surveys of students about hours studying and drinking, etc etc. Actually, I really don’t know what I should do about this.

4. Seth’s article also has a bunch of hypotheses about evolution of various social behaviors. I neither believe nor disbelieve these things–I just don’t know how to evaluate such things–but I think of them in a utilitarian sense as useful in helping Seth formulate hypotheses for his self-experimentation. Also, I like the Jane Jacobs references because I am also a big fan of her work (although maybe not all of it).

3 thoughts on “Diversity in learning

  1. To me, Seth's students had the necessary technical expertise (communication, social skills, etc.) and ready access to necessary materials (could interact with patients, give seminars to students, etc) for their chosen projects. Is this not likely to be less so in projects that try to generate (quantitative) evidence for something? One qualification I once heard of something being a science – was that it took more than 3 months to become an expert in it (not sure how that fits into Seth’s article). It may not work when there is a lot of technical training required and access to material (i.e. empirical data) is difficult. Allowing students to critique the methodology of any article of their choice from their professional journals worked once for me. Maybe with Gary King and others working on access to well documented original research data, students choice of reproducing AND modifying any existing published research claim (given data access is possible) might work.

    Keith

  2. "It seems that Seth's suggestion has worked–for him. I'll give it a try. But I still think I'll have to check their ideas and rule out the worst, such as comparisons of GPA's of athletes and nonatheletes, surveys of students about hours studying and drinking, etc etc."

    If done well, those studies you describe as the worst could actually provide some interesting insight. They sound as banal as "what diet works best", but, as Seth has shown, that idea produced some very surprising results.

  3. Andrew,

    In regards to noticing that students do uninteresting work on open-ended projects, I believe I have a theory on the root of such a phenomenom.

    From my experience, it seems relatively easy for statistics courses to be taught from the standpoint of teaching formulae and methods to apply in different situations. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to learn how to answer questions in textbooks without really having to think much or even understand some of the underlying theory and motivation for its development.

    I believe this inability to approach a problem in an original way is the result of years of being taught steps and methods and simply asked to reproduce them for homework assignments …. doesn't exactly seem like a method designed to foster creativity or interesting solutions.

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