Teaching

Note: This was first published on July 17, 2024.

During the pandemic I was confronted with the challenge of providing statistics software to students who had a wide range of hardware and software. Using statistics software installed on computers in the lab just wasn't an option for everyone. My solution was to code some web-based statistics calculators for basic introductory statistics needs: Descriptive statistics, t-tests, etc. These will work well even for extreme situations: on smartphones and for people who have weak internet connections.

My web-based statistics tools for introductory statistics classes have just been updated. Z-tests, t-tests, ANOVA, and chi-squared can now provide exact p values.

These aren't really intended to replace SPSS, R, JASP, and other professional-grade statistics software. Possible uses are classroom demonstrations or online instruction. There are also some practice pages that will give students data to work with, then provide an answer when students are ready.

These resources are educator friendly. There are no ads, unlike some horrible online calculators. CC licensing allows for free sharing and use, making these an open education resource (OER).

https://garyfisk.com/stats/index.html

Note: This was first published on May 13, 2024.

Asking students to write in college courses has been a long-time educational strategy. Writing a summary shows that the assigned work has been read. Paraphrasing is to express information and ideas in our own voice, thereby putting a personal stamp on what has been read. Higher order thinking is (hopefully) accomplished via applications, analysis, and similar cognitive operations. Altogether, written assignments can be described as a write-to-learn strategy.

New advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have raised questions about the value of these traditional approaches.

Summarizing written work can now easily be done by AI systems. Student submissions are increasingly well-done, but bland AI summaries. These are often just vague overviews. A request to summarize no longer demonstrates that the student read anything. Maybe this isn't entirely new, but it seems to be an increasing problem in the last year and a half.

Paraphrasing is also losing value as an educational tool. Here's two new tools that recently surpised me. Microsoft Copilot (through the Edge browser) offers "rewrite with copilot" for text pasted into a learning management system. Likewise, Google has a "help me write" option. Two screenshots are shown below.

This will be a mixed bag. The feedback may be helpful. The downside though is that this may be the beginning of a deskilling of writing.

Note: This was first published on March 5, 2021.

Transparency is a hot idea in higher education. The idea has multiple dimensions, but here we will focus on the essential "transparent" component: The need to clearly communicate the purpose of course activities to students. Why are we doing this assignment? What is the motivation? How does the current assignment connect to ideas that have already been covered? What skills will students gain by performing this task? Unfortunately, these important motivation-related questions are often not addressed. These critical ideas may be assumed by the professor rather than being explicitly stated.

The transparency movement has focused largely on assignments, with tilthighered.com having numerous examples. My contribution is that the transparent idea could be easily extended to PowerPoint presentations. The typical classroom PowerPoint presentation has excellent facts and information. The problem is a missing 'why?' explanation. The importance or purpose might be obvious to faculty experts, but novice learners may be largely unaware of why they should care about a particular topic.

The introduction is an ideal time to address 'why' questions. The motivational questions - why should we care? - should be addressed before launching into the facts and key terms to properly prepare students. The possibilities include ...

• The question: Have you ever wondered why people do/think ______? Let's explore why this occurs.
• Establishing context: How does today's topic relate to the ideas from the last course meeting? This is how today's topic fits into important course goals.
• Personal relevance: Today's topic will be essential for your life or career in this way. This presentation will help you gain an expert understanding that is useful for _____.
• History: A long-standing concern in our field/society is ______. Today, we will investigate three different attempts to address this issue.

The 'why' possibilities may be nearly infinite. The general aim is to address why anyone should care or find this topic interesting. A second important goal is helping students form connections between today's topic and previous topics or upcoming topics.

Like transparent assignments, taking just a few minutes at the beginning of a presentation to address these 'why?' questions can have a big impact. It is not necessary to overhaul everything in a PowerPoint presentation to gain the benefits of transparency. One or two slides at the beginning to promote motivation and establish context can be helpful to novices.

The transparent opening can even be a part of the slide design. Norman Eng has suggested a one sentence takeaway or mission statement. Here's an example from an opening slide in my Introductory Psychology course.

I hope this idea has been helpful. Please consider sharing good ideas for transparent openings in PowerPoint presentations.

Image credit https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Neuron.svg User: Dhp1080, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons

Note: This was first published on February 2, 2021.

The Impact of Multi-Media Presentation Format: Student Perceptions and Learning Outcomes by Katherine Moen, University of Nebraska Kearney (Note: This is the second post in a series of PowerPoint-related presentations from the Psychonomic 2020 meeting.)

An important issue for educators is the value of text vs. images in PowerPoint presentations. Do people learn best from words or images? How many words are too many words? Academic PowerPoint presentations tend to be text-heavy. On the other hand, images may be information-rich ('a picture is worth a thousand words') in ways that add a visual-spatial component to the spoken presentation.

This in-class study compared students who received standard PowerPoint slides (text plus small images) to student who received slides that were mostly images. The picture-based group had a small (about 5%) increase in exam scores. Student interest and engagement was about the same in both groups.

Commentary: This is a good illustration of how information-rich instructional graphics can be superior to text-focused slides. The results are consistent with Mayer's redundancy principle: Providing text on the slide that is essentially the same as the spoken presentation does not facilitate learning. Perhaps image-based slides require students to pay more attention to the spoken presentation, which then benefits learning. When the PowerPoint is mostly images, students could be more actively engaged or processing the lecture deeper than simply copying information from slides.

Note: This was first published on January 11, 2021.

This Excel file is a course calendar tool. Just enter the starting date of the semester and all the other dates will be automagically calculated! It speeds up the development of course calendars.

Screenshot:

Download the tool.

Instructions / tips for using the weekly calendar:

1. The year, month, and day in the upper right corner are the anchor points for all calculated dates. Start by entering this information.

- The day field should start on a Monday. - Default: The week calculations have Mondays for the start of the week. - Default: The due calculations assume that all assignments are due on Sundays. 2. The day offset values increase each week by seven days.
- The offset values can be customized. For example, use 14 day intervals for every two weeks. - For holiday weeks, it is easier to simply enter "spring break" (or whatever) compared to eliminating a week and fiddling with the day offset values.
3. The due date formula for Sundays is +6 from Monday (the start of the week).
- The due date can be adjusted. For example, Friday due dates could be set by using +4 rather than +6. 4. Enter the weekly topics and other special date information.
5. Create a finished calendar for students by selecting the important cells and printing the selection to a .pdf file.

Good luck with your courses!

Note: This was originally published on January 30, 2020.

Richard Dawkins has a great quote from Neil DeGrasse Tyson with an important insight into being a great educator. The context is that Dawkins has just given a critical presentation based upon impeccable facts. DeGrasse Tyson was concerned about the style of the presentation, so he offered the following constructive criticism.

Being an educator is not only getting the truth right, but there's got to be an act of persuasion in there as well. Persuasion isn't always 'Here's the facts, you are either an idiot or you're not.' It's 'Here's the facts, and here is a sensitivity to your state of mind.' And it's the facts plus the sensitivity, when convolved together, creates impact. p. 262

This combination of facts plus audience sensitivity is an excellent approach to take for every presentation.

Source: Dawkins, R. (2015). A brief candle in the dark: My life in science. Harper Collins, New York