Clear As Fine-Grained Sediment Mixed With Water: A Discussion Forum

This week I’m presenting a poster at the Earth Educators’ Rendezvous. The poster is about a discussion forum activity that I do with my introductory physical geology students at St. Peter’s College. I’ve turned my poster into a blog post just in case anyone is thinking about trying a similar activity and would like to refer back to it. Alternatively, folks may simply want to confirm that some nut at an academic meeting designed a poster consisting largely of cartoons. Either way, here it is.

You can download a copy of the handout for this activity, including the rubric, here.

This is a great resource from the University of Wisconsin-Stout for explaining online etiquette to students.

The Levitating Wiener Standard of Formative Assessment

Formative assessment, or informative assessment, as I like to call it, is the kind of evaluation you use when it’s more important to provide someone with information on how to improve than it is to put a number next to a name. Formative assessment might or might not include a grade, but it will include thoughtful and actionable feedback. Formative assessment of teachers is no less important than formative assessment of learners- both are needed for the magic to happen.

I struggle with how to get truly useful formative feedback from my students. There are different instruments for evaluating teaching, including SEEQ (the Students’ Evaluation of Educational Quality), but the problem with the instruments I’ve used is that they don’t provide specific enough information. Sure, there is a place where students can write comments to supplement the boxes they’ve checked off elsewhere on the form, but those spaces are often left blank, and when they’re not blank, they don’t necessarily say anything actionable.

I’ve concluded that I need to design my own questionnaires. But when I get down to the business of writing questions, it feels like an impossible task to design a survey that will get at exactly what I want to know. I do have a pretty high standard, however: the levitating wiener.

The mentalist and magician Jose Ahonen performs a magic trick where he presents a levitating wiener to dogs. You can watch the videos How Dogs React to Levitating Wiener (parts 1 and 2) below. These are fascinating videos… have a look.

The dogs in the videos have one of three reactions:

1. It’s a wiener! Gimme that wiener! These dogs react as one might expect, focusing on the existence of the wiener rather than on the fact that it is levitating.

2. How the heck are you doing that? These dogs ignore the wiener and focus on the palms of Jose’s hands instead. It’s as though they’ve decided that it doesn’t make sense for a wiener to be levitating, and he must be doing it by holding strings. In other words, these dogs are trying to figure out how he’s doing the trick, and they all seem to have the same hypothesis. (Incidentally, it’s probably the first hypothesis most humans would come up with.)

3. This is wrong… it’s just so wrong. These dogs watch for a moment and then get the heck out of there. Like the dogs in group 2 they also don’t think wieners should levitate, but they are too appalled by the violation of normality to formulate a hypothesis and investigate.

To my mind, most of the teaching assessment instruments are more like having the dogs fill out the questionnaire below than watching them interact with a levitating wiener.

Formative assessment for levitators of wieners

If the participants checked “agree” or “strongly agree” for “Weiners should not levitate,” it could mean something different for each dog. A dog from group 1 might object to having to snatch the wiener out of the air as opposed to having it handed to him. A dog from group 2 might think the question is asking about whether wieners are subject to gravity. A dog from group 3 might be expressing a grave concern about witchcraft. If the dogs wrote comments (we’re assuming literate doggies here), their comments might clarify the reasons behind their responses. Or they might just say there should be more wieners next time.

Now contrast the questionnaire with the experiment shown in the videos. Because of the experimental design, I learned things that I wouldn’t even have thought to ask about- I just assumed all dogs would react like group 1. I learned things the dogs themselves might never have written in their questionnaires. A dog from group 2 might not have noted his interest in the engineering problems surrounding hovering hot dogs in the “Additional comments” section. It might not have occurred to a dog from group 3 to mention that he was frightened by floating frankfurters. Maybe neither dog knew these things about himself until he encountered a levitating wiener for the first time.

A formative assessment tool that is up to the levitating wiener standard would tell me things I didn’t even consider asking about. It would tell me things that students might not even realize about their experience until they were asked.  Aside from hiring a magician, any suggestions?

Help for Students, Part 4: Exam Panic

Exam panic is a tricky problem, because once you experience it, it can make you worry about panicking in the future.  Once you are anxious about panicking, that makes it all the more likely. Fortunately there is a way to fix this. The solution is, go ahead and panic… sort of.

The problem: you see an exam but your brain sees certain death.

Your brain is an amazing bit of biology that has evolved over millions of years to serve the needs of our ancestors. Unfortunately, somewhere during that evolutionary process it became a toddler-like entity that, regardless of your good intentions, is willful, easily bored, and prone to inconvenient emotional outbursts. It learned a few good tricks that were suitable for helping our ancestors to escape from predators and each other, but since then it has stubbornly refused to acknowledge that those same tricks can be counterproductive when dealing with anxiety over situations that are not likely to kill you.

Brains do not react well to certain death.

When you see an exam and feel anxious, your brain sees something else entirely. As far as it’s concerned, that exam is actually a large carnivore about to eat you for lunch. Your brain will try its best to persuade you that you are about to die, and that you should run for your life. Your brain is wrong, but it is also convincing.

Expect some exam anxiety or even outright panic, but realize that you don’t have to accept what your brain is telling you about the situation. Sit back and let it have a fit, like you’re waiting out a child’s temper tantrum. Without your complicity, your brain will not maintain its high panic state, and will settle down again in a few minutes. If you happen to imagine it as an obnoxious pinkish-grey wrinkly thing running back and forth, waving its arms in the air, and screaming at the top of its lungs, that might speed things along.

Sometimes you just have to wait them out.

Exam panic is only a disaster if you think it is. If you begin to panic, and mistakenly believe that the panic is the result of an accurate assessment of your situation, then more panic follows. Even worse, when you panic, your cognitive functioning can diminish: amongst other things, you can forget what you’ve studied. So now you’re suddenly unable to remember anything you studied, and becoming convinced that you are facing catastrophe. This leads to the all too common experience of blanking on an exam only to suddenly remember all of the answers 30 minutes later, once you’ve begun to relax.

Unfortunately, you can’t leave it at home.

Fortunately, this can be managed by expecting that your brain will do stupid things in response to stress, realizing that you might have to let it freak out for a while, and then just waiting until it has regained its composure.

Help for Students, Part 3: Reasons for Miscalculating Course Expectations

After running into difficulty on an exam, some students will contact me to complain that there was an unreasonable amount of material to memorize for the course. So why did they not try to understand the course material rather than just memorize it? Maybe they thought memorizing would be easier and faster, or maybe they weren’t far enough along to transition toward understanding. They might also have underestimated how much they would be expected to know, and how well they would have to know it. As a result, they prepared too superficially.

1. Approach to the Assignments

In the course this has caused the most problems, students do assignments which are often accomplished by paraphrasing the textbook in a way that is only slightly better than copying it outright. (Not my assignment design!) Because of this approach, they can get the right answers (and therefore good grades) without actually understanding key parts of what they’ve written. There seems to be a chain of reasoning that runs: “I didn’t really understand the assignments, but I still did well on them. Therefore, I will be able to do well on the final exam with a similar level of understanding.”

In fact, it is never safe to take one’s performance on assignments at face value unless one can be confident that the conditions of the exam will match the conditions of the assignment. For example, if you refer to your textbook while solving physics problems, this is not the same as having to solve a physics problem on an exam without your textbook and while under pressure. A good grade on that physics assignment would tell you very little about how you will do on the exam. In the case of the course mentioned earlier, students’ performances over many offerings of the course show that there is effectively no correlation between assignment grades and exam results.

Another problem with paraphrasing the textbook very closely is that while I suspect that students who do so are not clear on what they are writing, I have no way of knowing for sure what they do and don’t understand. That means I may give a student full points on a question even though that student might have misunderstood the text that they paraphrased. In that case, getting full points might convince a student that their understanding is correct, when in fact it isn’t. That student has eliminated any chance for me to find the error… until I grade the exam, that is. Then I hear from them.

2. Reasonability Assumption

When filtering out what is and isn’t necessary to study, a starting point might be the assumption that an instructor will not be unreasonable and will avoid demanding complex details, or asking questions about extremely difficult topics. One problem with this assumption, however, is that someone who is new to a field of study will not have the same perception of what is difficult or complex as someone who has worked in the field for a while. An idea that might seem complicated to the uninitiated could be a very basic principle in that field. A second problem is that sometimes a complicated or difficult topic can be very important for a particular area of study, and therefore necessary to learn even though learning it might seem nearly impossible at the time.

You may think that another problem with the reasonability assumption is that some instructors are unreasonable and use exams to punish students. I can’t say that’s never the case, but I will point out that a “reasonable” exam is not an exam that any student can pass; it is an exam that a student can pass if they have done a reasonable job of covering the stated course objectives.

In the end, if you’re not sure about whether something is important or not, and you can’t determine that from the learning objectives or course objectives, just ask your instructor.

3. Perceived Importance of the Course

In my introductory level courses, I sometimes hear from students who are unhappy about having to take the course. These are students for whom the course is the last one they need to get their degree. They might feel that the course is a pointless hoop to jump through, and they just want to get it over with and get on with their lives. Understanding the course material is not a priority, and feelings about how much work they should have to do for the course can colour their perspectives on how much work is actually required.

Nevertheless, even if a student’s reasons for taking the course colour their expectations about what the exam will be like or should be like, it does not affect the reality. The requirements will be the same regardless of why a student is taking the course, and students should expect that there could be the same kinds of demands as in courses that they view as more serious, or more important for achieving their goals.  Put another way, no-one should expect to get credit for a course without fulfilling its requirements.  I would also recommend against telling your instructor that they should pass you because their course doesn’t matter.

4. Learning Is What Someone Else Does to Your Head

Every now and again I run into students who prefer to be passive participants in their own learning. These are students who think that I should put more effort into helping them than they are willing to put into helping themselves. “Frank” was a classic case. Before assignments came due, he would email to ask what pages the answers were on in the textbook. An email exchange with Frank would look like this:

Frank: “I can’t find the answers to questions 1b, 1c, 2a, 2b, 3, 5, and 7. Can you tell me where I should read in the textbook?”

Me: “For question 1b asking what igneous rocks are, you can find the answer in the section titled “What Igneous Rocks Are” starting on page 53.”

Sometimes it is hard to find a specific topic amid other details, so I explained to Frank how he could look up the page numbers in the index of the textbook. Frank disregarded my explanation, and continued to ask similar questions.

I want to be careful to distinguish between students who take a passive approach, and those who ask a lot of questions about different topics, those who ask for help with the same topic repeatedly, or those who need assistance deciphering their textbooks. By definition, these students are not taking a passive approach because their questions have arisen out of an effort to understand the course material. In fact, I would prefer that more students contacted me with those kinds of questions. But this is very different from asking me to look up pages for you in the index.

Students who are passive about their learning will inevitably underestimate the amount of understanding that is required because they believe on some level that learning and understanding are things that they are given. That’s just not the way learning works.

Help for Students, Part 2: Memorizing vs. Understanding

After a recent exam I received an email from a student who claimed the exam was unreasonable difficult. They blamed the difficulty on the fact that it was a short-answer exam, meaning they didn’t have multiple options to choose from. The student argued that more information was required than a student could reasonably be expected to memorize.

The exam did require more knowledge than a student might reasonably be expected to memorize, and that was because the students were expected to understand the course material rather than just memorize it. Memorization is a very inefficient way to attempt to store information. Understanding is much better. It’s the difference between learning the lyrics to your favourite song by trying to remember the words in random order, or learning them as they fit into lines and verses and tell a story.  One is next to impossible, and the other you can do after listening to the song a few times.

That’s not to say there is no memorizing involved, but ideally the situation would look something like Plan A in the diagram below. The diagram is a sketch of what part of your knowledge would depend on memorizing, and what part would depend on understanding as you progress through the course. Initially, there is quite a lot of memorizing required as you encounter new terms for the first time, but at the same time your understanding is increasing. Eventually, you are able to add new knowledge by building on your understanding, and less memorizing is required.

If a substantial amount of learning gets left to the last minute, then to be as prepared as in Plan A, learning must happen a lot faster. In that case, we’re looking at Plan B where memorizing and understanding are condensed into a small amount of time. Unfortunately, you can only learn so much before you need a break, so what actually happens is C. There is insufficient time to prepare, and that time is taken up mostly by memorizing because you don’t yet have enough of the individual puzzle pieces to start to build the big picture.

Help for Students, Part 1: The Curse of the Unknown Unknowns

Students often ask whether I can offer any tips on preparing for and writing exams. Sometimes they are new students who haven’t developed study strategies yet, and sometimes they have just become frustrated with strategies that don’t seem to be working for them. Sometimes they are panicked and desperate, and end their emails with “HELP” followed by several exclamation points. (Never a good sign.) So I thought it might be time to jot these things down in one place, rather than writing them over and over again in emails to unhappy students who waited until it was too late to ask for help .

If there is one thing that causes more problems for students preparing for exams than any other, it would be the unknown unknowns:

“…as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”  Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense, 12 Feb 2002

When studying, known knowns are the topics you are confident about, and which you are right to be confident about. Known unknowns are the deficits in your knowledge that you are aware of, and which you therefore have a chance to fix. Where you get in trouble, however, are the unknown unknowns—the deficits in your knowledge that you don’t realize exist. You can’t fix those because you don’t know they’re there. At least, you don’t know they’re there until you hit an exam question you didn’t realize you were unprepared for. Then they become known unknowns, but it’s too late to do anything about them.

Here are two examples of what a run-in with unknown unknowns can sound like. Unfortunately, I receive emails like this on a regular basis:

Sally:

“I realize I am not going to pass this course even with the 20+ hours I studied over the last week. I have trouble putting the definitions on paper. I remember reading them and seeing them but can’t remember the definition.”

 Bert:

“I felt as though I at least I completed the test and did not leave it blank, and felt confident that half my responses where right, but must have gotten confused.”

Note: “Bert” and “Sally” are not real students.

Sally’s unknown unknowns turned into known unknowns during the exam. In contrast, Bert emailed me because he was shocked that his exam grade was so low; Bert’s unknown unknowns were so sneaky that he got right through the exam without even noticing them.

The main problem that Bert and Sally had is that brains can be deceiving. In Sally’s case, after more than 20 hours of studying, everything looked familiar to her, and thus she believed she was ready for the exam. Unfortunately for Sally, the appearance of the page was what was familiar, not the information on it.

For both Sally and Bert it would have been a simple matter to set a trap for the unknown unknowns: if Sally and Bert had put their notes away every few minutes and tried to explain verbally or in writing what they had just read, they would have found very quickly that they couldn’t do it. Then they could have fixed the problem. Unfortunately, this is very hard work and should not be done for more than 45 minutes or so without taking a break. In Sally’s case, after many sustained hours of studying, she would likely have been too tired to manage it. She probably continued reading and not absorbing partly because she was too tired to do anything else.

Some of the sneakiest unknown unknowns hide so well that you might need someone else’s help to find them. Those are the kind where you remember information, but don’t realize that you have some part of it incorrect. The best way to trap these is to work with someone who might be able to pick up errors in your understanding as you explain the course material to them. This could be someone else in the class, or just a friend who asks you questions by referring to the textbook. Here are a few strategies that I’ve found helpful for turning unknown unknowns into known unknowns:

• Scare them out into the open: Imagine that your instructor were to call you out of the blue to ask you questions about the course. What would you not want them to ask you about? Along the same lines, what would you not want to be asked about on the exam?

• If a list of learning objectives is provided, treat them as questions and attempt to answer them without looking at your notes.

• Reorganize information into diagrams and tables. For example, if you made a table to compare and contrast Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, you might find that you can say something about Neanderthal body size, but you don’t remember how that compares to Cro-Magnon body size.   Diagrams and tables have the added benefit of being much easier to remember than lists of facts.

• Study by explaining topics out loud to yourself or a friend. There is a difference between reading facts and trying to mentally organize them so you can say them out loud, and that difference can be enough to throw you off balance and expose unknown unknowns.

Why I Don’t Give Extra Credit Assignments

I view extra credit assignments as problematic because they can be unfair to other students in the course, they don’t necessarily solve the problem of missed learning outcomes, and they’re a hassle for me.

Let’s say I’m teaching a carpentry class called Potting Sheds 101. Students sign up to learn how to build potting sheds. Their final exam is building a potting shed. They may or may not go into the potting-shed building industry after graduation. On the last day of class the final projects are evaluated. Bob’s potting shed is out of square, and collapses when the door is opened. Bob fails. Later I receive the following email from Bob:

“Hey, how are u? I’m Bob in Potting Shed 101. I failed my final project. It’s been a really hard month for me, plus I didn’t have money to buy the textbook or a hammer. I found the final project did not suit my learning style, and was shocked at how difficult it was. Talk about being expected to run before even learning to walk! I will definitely be commenting about this in the course evaluation. Plus I was delayed getting started because I had to borrow a hammer from the library, and it was recalled and still hasn’t been returned yet. Potting Shed 101 is the last class I need for my degree, and I don’t plan to build potting sheds for a living, but I really need to pass the class to graduate. Is there some extra credit work I could do to pass the course with a high enough grade to get my degree? I feel I already learned a lot, and I would need at least 65 to graduate.”

Note that Bob’s email bears a striking resemblance to the types of emails I frequently receive.

So what should I do with Bob? Here are some considerations:

• Bob knew he would need a hammer to build potting sheds. Other students made sure they had the supplies necessary before signing up. It is unfortunate that Bob doesn’t have a hammer, but does this justify extra credit work?

• Bob should have expected that building a potting shed would be part of Potting Sheds 101, so I don’t accept his argument that the final evaluation was unreasonable.

• Bob is suggesting that the class doesn’t mean anything to him, but is just a course that his program required for some reason, and that he won’t use the skills (although he still claims to have learned something).

• Bob expects that whatever he will do for extra credit will get him at least 65% in the course, and can be done in time so that he will graduate as expected.

• If I give Bob the opportunity for extra credit, are the other students any less deserving? Should they not be allowed extra credit projects too?

What if I cave in to Bob’s request? Bob suggests that he make ten bird houses for extra credit. Bird houses are not potting sheds, so he would be getting credit for doing a task that is much easier than the original task. Bob assumes that demonstrating a willingness to work hard is equivalent to demonstrating competency in potting-shed building. While a good work ethic is admirable, it is not the same as being able to build a potting shed. If Bob changes his mind about working in the potting shed industry, he will use the grade I gave him to convince an employer that he can build potting sheds. If Bob shows his grade in potting-shed building to prospective employers who don’t deal in potting sheds, they may take it as a sign that he is somewhat handy, has reasonable hand-eye coordination, and can handle complex tasks that require precision and attention to detail.

Let’s go one step further and assume I let Bob hand in his 10 bird houses. They are consistent with his skill at potting-shed building. Am I required to give him extra credit even though his work is substandard? If I don’t, must I allow him to do extra extra credit work?

What if the day after Bob hands in his 10 bird houses, Carrie sends me an email:

 “I heard you let Bob build bird houses for extra credit. Can I build bird houses for extra credit, too? I’d really like to improve my grade because I want to get into the Advanced Potting Sheds program.”  

This is a very competitive program, and if I let Carrie do the extra credit work, her grade would not reflect her skill at potting-shed building, but it would give her an advantage compared to other students who apply to the program.  Is that fair?

Then I hear from Marty:

“I heard you let Bob hand in bird houses for extra credit. I made some when I was in grade four. Can I hand those in for extra credit?”

If Marty has demonstrated the skill, does that not count? If he had brought a completed potting shed to class on the first day, should he have received credit for the course? Some would say yes.

Beatrice:

“I heard you were taking bird houses for extra credit. My neighbours have some. Can I get credit for those?”

I would have to explain to Beatrice that she must make the bird houses herself. She would then request step-by-step instructions on how to build a bird house, and ask if she could come to my office hours to get help.

On a box delivered to my front door, containing 20 bird houses with the “Made in China” stickers still attached:

“Here are my bird houses for extra credit. Thx. Pete”

In an email from the department head:

“WHY are you letting students build bird houses for credit in Potting Sheds 101? They’re supposed to be building POTTING SHEDS!”

You see, it’s just way too complicated.

Plagiarism-Proof Assignments: The Up-Goer Five Challenge

Ok, so there’s probably no such thing as a plagiarism-proof assignment, but I think I’ve got a reasonable approximation thereof.

It originated with my frustration with the perpetual struggle to have students in my distance education classes answer questions in their own words. My students are using their textbooks to answer questions, and many seem to feel that a textbook is the exception to the rule when it comes to plagiarism. Some simply don’t understand that they’re doing anything wrong. From experience, I can tell you that many people who are not my students also see it that way, and complaining about it is a great way to be branded as unreasonable. The problem, as I’ve documented before, is that students who copy from their textbook also tend to fail the class. After last term, I’ve decided that it’s in my best interest to consume alcohol before grading assignments. I’m not allowed to ignore plagiarism, but what I don’t see…

Absent blissful ignorance, the only way to deal with plagiarism (without causing myself a variety of problems) is to change the assignments so that plagiarism isn’t possible. Now, if you’ve attempted to do this, you know it isn’t easy. A search online will give you tips like having students put themselves in the position of a person experiencing a historical event, and explaining their perspective on the matter. That’s something students (most likely) can’t copy from the internet. But suggestions like that are not especially helpful when the topic is how volcanoes work. (Although now that I think about it, “Imagine you are an olivine crystal in a magma chamber…”)

The solution came from my online source of comfort, xkcd. Randall Munroe, the creator of the webcomic, set himself the challenge of labeling a diagram of NASA’s Saturn 5 rocket (Up Goer Five) with only the 1000 most commonly used words in the English language. Soon after, members of the geoscience community took up the challenge of explaining their fields of research in the 1000 most commonly used words. Here are two examples from a blog post by hydrogeologist Anne Jefferson. Anne writes:

” So I decided to see if I could explain urban hydrology and why I study it using only the words in the list. Here’s what I came up with:

I study how water moves in cities and other places. Water is under the ground and on top of it, and when we build things we change where it can go and how fast it gets there. This can lead to problems like wet and broken roads and houses. Our roads, houses, and animals, can also add bad things to the water. My job is to figure out what we have done to the water and how to help make it better. I also help people learn how to care about water and land. This might seem like a sad job, because often the water is very bad and we are not going to make things perfect, but I like knowing that I’m helping make things better.

Science, teach, observe, measure, buildings, and any synonym for waste/feces were among the words I had to write my way around. If I hadn’t had access to “water”, I might have given up in despair.

But my challenge was nothing compared to that faced by Chris, as he explained paleomagnetism without the word magnet:

I study what rocks tell us about how the ground moves and changes over many, many (more than a hundred times a hundred times a hundred) years. I can do this because little bits hidden inside a rock can remember where they were when they formed, and can give us their memories if we ask them in the right way. From these memories we can tell how far and how fast the rocks have moved, and if they have been turned around, in the time since they were made. It is important to know the stories of the past that rocks tell, because it is only by understanding that story that we really understand the place where we live, how to find the things that we need to live there, and how it might change in the years to come. We also need to know these things so we can find the places where the ground can move or shake very fast, which can be very bad for us and our homes.”

Is that brilliant, or what?! To make it even better, Theo Sanderson developed a text editor to check whether only those words have been used. This is what happened when I typed part of the introduction to the chapter on volcanoes:

Yes, fortunately it has the word “rock.”

I decided to test-drive this with my class. I gave them the option of answering their assignment questions in this way. It’s difficult, so they got bonus points for doing it. A handful attempted it, and that was probably the most fun I’ve ever had grading assignments. If you’d like to give this kind of assignment a shot, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• Students (and colleagues) may be skeptical. Explain that the exercise requires a solid knowledge of the subject matter (in contrast to paraphrasing the textbook) and is a very effective way for students to diagnose whether they know what they think they know. In my books, that gives it a high score in the learning-per-unit-time category.

• The text editor has some work-arounds, like putting single quotes around a word, or adding “Mr or “Mrs” in front of a word (e.g., Mr Magma). Head those off at the pass, or you’ll get “But you didn’t say we couldn’t!”

• You may wish to allow certain words for the assignment or for specific questions, depending on your goals. For example, if I were less diabolical, I might consider allowing the use of “lava.” The other reason for not allowing “lava” is that I want to be sure they know what it means. In contrast, I probably wouldn’t make them struggle with “North America.”

• Make it clear that simple language does not mean simple answers. I found that students tended to give imprecise answers that didn’t address important details. I don’t think they were trying to cut corners—they just didn’t think it was necessary. If I were to do this again I would give them a rubric with examples of what is and isn’t adequate.

• Recommend that they write out the key points of their answers in normal language first, and in a separate document, and then attempt to translate it.

• Suggest that they use analogies or comparisons if they are stuck. For example, Randall Munroe refers to hydrogen as “the kind of air that once burned a big sky bag.”

• Make the assignment shorter than you might otherwise, and focus on key objectives. Doing an assignment this way is a lot of work, and time consuming.

• And finally, (as with all assignments) try it yourself first.

In that spirit:

I like to make stories with numbers to learn what happens when things go into the air that make air hot. Very old rocks from deep under water say things that help make number stories. The number stories are not perfect but they still tell us important ideas about how our home works. Some day the number stories about how old air got hot might come true again, but maybe if people know the old number stories, they will stop hurting the air. If they don’t stop hurting the air, it will be sad for us because our home will change in bad ways.

Time: The Final Frontier

A logo begging for a t-shirt

Here it is: the final incarnation of my design project for Design and Development of Educational Technology—the Timefleet Academy. It’s a tool to assist undergraduate students of historical geology with remembering events in Earth history, and how those events fit into the Geological Time Scale. Much of their work consists of memorizing a long list of complicated happenings. While memorizing is not exactly at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy (it’s exactly at the bottom, in fact), it is necessary. One could approach this task by reading the textbook over and over, and hoping something will stick, but I think there’s a better way.

I envision a tool with three key features:

• A timeline that incorporates the Geological Time Scale, and “zooms” to show events that occur over widely varying timescales

• The ability to add events from a pre-existing library onto a custom timeline

• Assessments to help students focus their efforts effectively

Here’s an introduction to the problem, and a sketch of my solution. If your sensors start to detect something familiar about this enterprise then you’re as much of a nerd as I am.

Timefleet Academy is based on the constructionist idea that building is good for learning. Making a representation of something (in this case, Earth history) is a way of distilling its essential features. That means analyzing what those features are, how they are related, and expressing them explicitly. Ultimately this translates to the intuitive notion that it is best to approach a complex topic by breaking it into small digestible pieces.

This is what you get to memorize.

As challenging as the Geological Time Scale is to memorize, it does lend itself to “chunking” because the Time Scale comes already subdivided. Even better, those subdivisions are designed to reflect meaningful stages (and therefore meaningful groupings of events) in Earth history.

There is an official convention regarding the colours in the Geological Time Scale (so no, it wasn’t my choice to put red, fuchsia, and salmon next to each other), and I’ve used it on the interface for two reasons. One is that it’s employed on diagrams and geological maps, so students might as well become familiar with it. The other is that students can take advantage of colour association as a memory tool.

Assessments

Assessments are a key difference between Timefleet Academy and other “zoomable” timelines that already exist. The assessments would come in two forms.

1. Self assessment checklists

These allow users to document their progress through the list of resources attached to individual events. This might seem like a trivial housekeeping matter, but mentally constructing a map of what resources have been used costs cognitive capital. Answering the question “Have I been here already?” has a non-zero cognitive load, and one that doesn’t move the user toward the goal of learning historical geology.

2. Drag-and-drop drills

The second kind of assessment involves drill-type exercises where users drag and drop objects representing events, geological time periods, and dates, to place them in the right order. The algorithm governing how drills are set would take into account the following:

• The user’s previous errors: It would allow for more practice in those areas.

• Changes in the user’s skill level: It would adjust by making tasks more or less challenging. For example, the difficulty level could be increased by going from arranging events in chronological order to arranging them chronologically and situating them in the correct spots on the Geological Time Scale. Difficulty could also be increased by placing time limits on the exercise, requiring that the user apply acquired knowledge rather than looking up the information.

• The context of events: If drills tend to focus on the same group of events, the result could be overly contextualized knowledge. In other words, if the student were repeatedly drilled on the order of events A, B, and C separately from the order of events D, E, and F, and were then asked to put A, B, and E in the right order, there could be a problem.

The feedback from drills would consist of correct answers and errors being indicated at the end of each exercise, and a marker placed on the timeline to indicate where (when) errors have occurred. Students would earn points toward a promotion within Timefleet Academy for completing drills, and for correct answers.

Who wouldn’t want a cool new uniform?

How do you know if it works?

1. Did learning outcomes improve?

This could be tested by comparing the performance of a group of students who used the tool to that of a control group who didn’t. Performance measures could be results from a multiple choice exam. They could also be scores derived from an interview with each student, where he or she is asked questions to gauge not only how well events are recalled, but also whether he or she can explain the larger context of an event, including causal relationships. It would be interesting to compare exam and interview scores for students within each group to see how closely the results of a recall test track the results of a test focused on understanding.

For the group of students who have access to the tool, it would be important to have a measure of how they used it, and how often. For example, did they use it once and lose interest? Did they use it for organizing events but not do drills? Or did they work at it regularly, adding events and testing themselves throughout? Without this information, it would be difficult to know how to interpret differences (or a lack of differences) in performance between the two groups.

 2. Do they want to use it?

This is an important indicator of whether students perceive that the tool is helpful, but also of their experience interacting with it. Students could be surveyed about which parts of the tool were useful and which weren’t, and asked for feedback about what changes would make it better. (The option to print out parts of the timeline, maybe?) They could be asked specific questions about aspects of the interface, such as whether their drill results were displayed effectively, whether the controls were easy to use, etc. It might be useful to ask them if they would use the tool again, either in its current form, or if it were redesigned to take into account their feedback.

Timefleet in the bigger picture

All set to pass the test of time

Timefleet Academy is ostensibly a tool to aid in memorizing the details of Earth history, but it actually does something more than that. It introduces students to a systematic way of learning- by identifying key features within an ocean of details, organizing those features, and then testing their knowledge.

The point system rewards students for testing their knowledge regardless of whether they get all of the answers right. The message is twofold: testing one’s knowledge is valuable because it provides information about what to do next; and testing one’s knowledge counts as progress toward a goal even if you don’t get the right answers every time. Maybe it’s threefold: if you do enough tests, eventually you get a cape, and a shirt with stars on it.

Building Assessments into a Timeline Tool for Historical Geology

In my last post I wrote about the challenges faced by undergraduate students in introductory historical geology. They are required to know an overwhelming breadth and depth of information about the history of the Earth, from 4.5 billion years ago to present. They must learn not only what events occurred, but also the name of the interval of the Geological Time Scale in which they occurred. This is a very difficult task! The Geological Time Scale itself is a challenge to memorize, and the events that fit on it often involve processes, locations, and organisms that students have never heard of. If you want to see a case of cognitive overload, just talk to a historical geology student.

My proposed solution was a scalable timeline. A regular old timeline is helpful for organizing events in chronological order, and it could be modified to include the divisions of the Geological Time Scale. However, a regular old timeline is simply not up to the task of displaying the relevant timescales of geological events, which vary over at least six orders of magnitude. It is also not up to the job of displaying the sheer number of events that students must know about. A scalable timeline would solve those problems by allowing students to zoom in and out to view different timescales, and by changing which events are shown depending on the scale. It would work just like Google Maps, where the type and amount of geographic information that is displayed depends on the map scale.

Doesn’t that exist already?

My first round of Google searches didn’t turn anything up, but more recently round two hit paydirt… sort of. Timeglider is a tool for making “zoomable” timelines, and allows the user to imbed media. It also has the catch phrase “It’s like Google Maps but for time,” which made me wonder if my last post was re-inventing the wheel.

ChronoZoom was designed with Big History in mind, which is consistent with the range of timescales that I would need. I experimented with this tool a little, and discovered that users can build timelines by adding exhibits, which appear as nodes on the timeline. Users can zoom in on an exhibit and access images, videos, etc.

If I had to choose, I’d use ChronoZoom because it’s free, and because students could create their own timelines and incorporate timelines or exhibits that I’ve made. Both Timeglider and ChronoZoom would help students organize information, and ChronoZoom already has a Geological Time Scale, but there are still features missing. One of those features is adaptive formative assessments that are responsive to students’ choices about what is important to learn.

Learning goals

There is a larger narrative in geological history, involving intricate feedbacks and cause-and-effect relationships, but very little of that richness is apparent until students have done a lot of memorization. My timeline tool would assist students in the following learning goals:

• Memorize the Geological Time Scale and the dates of key event boundaries.
• Memorize key events in Earth history.
• Place individual geological events in the larger context of Earth history.

These learning goals fit right at the bottom of Bloom’s Taxonomy, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important to accomplish. Students can’t move on to understanding why things happened without first having a good feeling for the events that took place. It’s like taking a photo with the lens cap on- you just don’t get the picture.

And why assessments?

This tool is intended to help students organize and visualize the information they must remember, but they still have to practice remembering it in order for it to stick. Formative assessments would give students that practice, and students could use the feedback from those assessments to gauge their knowledge and direct their study to the greatest advantage.

How it would work

The assessments would address events on a timeline that the students construct for themselves (My Timeline) by selecting from many hundreds of events on a Master Timeline. The figure below is a mock-up of what My Timeline would look like when the scale is limited to a relatively narrow 140 million year window. When students select events, related resources (videos, images, etc.) would also become accessible through My Timeline.

A mock-up of My Timeline. A and B are pop-up windows designed to show students which resources they have used. C is access to practice exercises, and D is how the tool would show students where they need more work.

Students would benefit from two kinds of assessments:

Completion checklists and charts

The problem with having abundant resources is keeping track of which ones you’ve already looked at. Checklists and charts would show students which resources they have used. A mouse-over of a particular event would pop up a small window (A in the image above) with the date (or range of dates) of the event and a pie chart with sections representing the number of resources that are available for that event. A mouse-over on the pie chart would pop up a hyperlinked list of those resources (B). Students would choose whether to check off a particular resource once they are satisfied that they have what they need from it, or perhaps flag it if they find it especially helpful. If a resource is relevant for more than one event, and shows up on multiple checklists, then checks and flags would appear for all instances.

Drag-and-drop exercises

Some of my students construct elaborate sets of flashcards so they can arrange events or geological time intervals spatially. Why not save them the trouble of making flashcards?

Students could opt to practice remembering by visiting the Timefleet Academy (C). They would do exercises such as:

• Dragging coloured blocks labeled with Geological Time Scale divisions to put them in the right order
• Dragging events to either put them in the correct chronological order (lower difficulty) or to position them in the correct location on the timeline (higher difficulty)
• Dragging dates from a bank of options onto the Geological Time Scale or onto specific events (very difficult)

Upon completion of each of the drag-and-drop exercise, students would see which parts of their responses were correct. Problem areas (for example, a geological time period in the wrong order) would be marked on My Timeline with a white outline (D) so students could review those events in the appropriate context. White outlines could be cleared directly by the student, or else by successfully completing Timefleet Academy exercises with those components.

Drag-and-drop exercises would include some randomly selected content, as well as items that the student has had difficulty with in the past. The difficulty of the exercises could be scaled to respond to increasing skill, either by varying the type of drag-and-drop task, or by placing time limits on the exercise. Because a student could become very familiar with one stretch of geologic time without knowing others very well, the tool would have to detect a change in skill level and respond accordingly.

A bit of motivation

Students would earn points for doing Timefleet Academy exercises. To reward persistence, they would earn points for completing the exercises, in addition to points for correct responses. Points would accumulate toward a progression through Timefleet Academy ranks, beginning with Time Cadet, and culminating in Time Overlord (and who wouldn’t want to be a Time Overlord?). Progressive ranks could be illustrated with an avatar that changes appearance, or a badging system. As much as I’d like to show you some avatars and badges, I am flat out of creativity, so I will leave it to your imagination for now.