Ok, so maybe that test missed the mark by more than would have been reasonable in a perfect world but how does one determine that for sure.

What does an exam with an average of 57.5 mean?  Does it mean the instructor did a horrible job of teaching the material to the students?  Or does it mean that the students did or horrible job preparing (or not preparing) for the exam?  Or does it mean that the exam was unreasonably difficult or long based on normal student ability?  All three are reasonably plausible explanations that are consistent with the data, and experiments could be conducted to test each of those plausible explanations, but …

So we will initially assume that the third possibility (which allows everyone the ability to save face to some degree) is the case and move on from there.  This is supported, in part, by the fact that relatively simple questions, late in the test, were missed by a significantly large portion of the students.  High levels of stress due to exam length seem a likely rational.  Providing a make-up opportunity for the students to demonstrate that they do, in fact, know the material in question would be a suitable way to test this.  We shall see.

Not quite burned, but certainly on fire.  After grading most of the exam, it has become clear that things certainly did not go well.  Simple questions missed by close to half the students who clearly should have, and likely did, know the answer to (what is the name for H2O) indicate a significant level of stress during the test.  Once finished and returned to the students, conversations need to be had about the exam and the reasons for poor performance and high stress levels.

Initial thoughts – too many questions in an effort to make questions worth less so as to reduce the penalty, gradewise, for missed questions resulting in not enough time to spend on all the questions because of time mismanagement.

When exams go badly (not as planned or expected), how do you decide the source of the problem, so as to address it and not create other problems in it’s place.  Did the students do poorly because I did a bad job teaching them, or because they did not study enough in preparing for it, or because the test was more difficult than it should have been or because the exam was long or unclear or confusing?

It would be nice to have the luxury of several plausible explanations with testable hypotheses.

Half multiple choice, half partial credit and show your work.  Exams, especially the first one, always seem to take the students longer than I think they should.  Maybe it is the learning curve and the adjustment to expectations.  Maybe it is time to beakdown and start asking less questions worth more points each.  Or maybe students will take it as a challenge and rise to the level of expectation.  Always a tough balance between setting the bar high enough to challenge but yet low enough so that they don’t get discouraged and give up.

The eve of the first college-level chemistry course exam with all the anxiety, nervous tension, and stress that accompanies that realization, especially when coupled with the first college-level biology exam that preceded it at the end of last week and the procrastination on chemistry studying that accompanied said biology exam.  Can we (or should we), as instructors, work to reduce and/or alleviate this stress or is it simply an unavoidable law nature whose effects must be experienced before other obstacles can be approached and surmounted.

A fellow senior faculty member once told me that it was my responsibility to make sure that the students successfully completed the course and moved on to the next one.  While I strongly disagree, I also stop and wonder if I am doing everything I can to enable or promote their opportunities for success.  Where do we cross over on the responsibility spectrum from it being primarily the instructor’s responsibility to it being primarily the student’s responsibility?  What fraction of the population in a “normal” class should be expected to successfully complete the course and continue on in the discipline?

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Went in to lab this morning with a great deal of trepidation and concern.

My frequent surprise over the different collective abilities of different lab sections (small group) of the same lecture course (big group) is reinforced every semester.  Each semester I seem to have some sections of lab that understand things better than other sections do.  Unfortunately, the converse is also true.  Based on results earlier in the week, I expected greater difficulty today with a critical thinking activity for developing a strategy to determine the identity of an unknown aqueous solution.  As it turns out, they did not have the difficulties I expected, perhaps in part to do planned remediation strategies because of the expected difficulties.  Rather than allowing them significant independence in coming up with a strategy on their own, I circled through the room, breaking down the problem with individual pairs of students and giving them much more individualized attention through a series of question designed to help them come up with the strategies and steps on their own.  It went remarkably well.  a few pairs need to repeat the process several times before it finally sank in but everyone was eventually successful in coming up with a strategy for analyzing their unknown solution.  It is really nice to have the time and the class size that enables this kind of attention to happen.

Occasionally things actually do go well and successfully, and as planned.Lecture today in chemistry was like that.  We probably road the bologna, cheese, and pickle sandwich model for limiting reagent problems further in to the sunset than we should have but it was working, so why not?  The students seemed to understand the concept of initial/change/final charts for stoichiometry calculations and, with one erroneous molar mass in the problem, everything seemed to go well, including finishing on time.

I guess we will not really know if things went as well as planned until the exam next week but for now, all my students are still brilliant and I must be a great teacher as well.

It can be dangerous to put significant stock in first impressions when glancing at the initial submission of an assignment or lab report.  Because I have just spent time presenting the material in the clearest way I know, I think it must be just as clear to the students as it is to me.  Otherwise, they would have asked the relevant questions necessary to make it clear.  As a result, I have high expectations for their performance on the assignment and quickly glance over the submissions as they come in.  The results (performances) that correctly understood the concept do not create any cognitive dissonance because that was what was expected and focus on them is transitional and quickly shifts.  First impressions instead focus on those who did not understand the concept and relative time spent on the two groups dose not match up exactly with the population size of both groups.  As a result, I tend to over-estimate the number of students struggling and create a much more dire situation than the results actually call for.

Take home lesson – Don’t look at the assignments before I am actually ready to sit down, with some sort of rubric, and grade them.  Also, don’t make a decision about student performance or assignment quality until looking at all the results of the whole class of students.

Started behind and not really catching up.  This has been an odd start to the semester that leaves me wondering if current experience is unique to the oddities of the immediate semester or symptoms of a greater problem.  At the end of the third week, I am still not done with the second chapter and we are just barely starting to talk about chemical reaction types stoichiometric calculations.  I find myself locked in to topics for discussion that I know truly deserve less time than I am giving I am unable to cut back the time spent because doing so would not fully develop what is a necessary and essential concept.  I guess I could just say “This is how you do this problem.  It will be on the test.  Next.”  But that seems counterproductive to me because, while they might memorize it for the test, it won’t stick long term if it is not relevant.  On the other hand, do they really pay attention to relevance or am I trying to something that only reaches out to and helps a small minority of the students.

Possible thought for improvement:  Maybe too much is invested in these notes and they carry too much extra baggage and it is time to scrap them and start over from the beginning with a “bare-bones” construction of what is essential as a framework to start building the course on again.  Hmmm.

This week the first set of lab reports have been slowly coming in.  In the past, this lab has been a challenge because it pushes students to think in ways they have not thought about before.  To correct this, I worked to enhance the pre-lab discussion with more information on relative error. and absolute error and the differences between them.  Initial glances at the submissions indicate that the lengthy class discussion on significant figures and their importance in this lab were lost in translation that many of the students don’t understand relative error.  There also seems to be a broad disregard for units on the numbers being reported.

Remedy plans and questions:

1)  Reformat the report page to change what is being ask for.  Clarification of where the numbers come from.  Space out the report page to include room to show calculations.  Ask for absolute error in addition to relative error so that students are forced to think about both.

2)  Don’t assume that additional information in the pre-lab will solve the problem.  They need to see someone work through an example so they have something to follow.  I think I dropped the ball and did explain it well enough because I thought the added written explanation would be enough.  NOT.

3)  Maybe I need to prepare a sample of how the lab report should have been done and share it with the class after I return the graded lab reports.  I need to do this carefully so that it guides their thinking rather than replacing it.

4)  Is the quality of the lab report submissions a reflection of the students adjusting to college life and my expectations?  Are my standards higher than they should be or are they something that the students need to adjust to as the stretch their own abilities?  I told them to concentrate on the questions on the back of the report that require greater analysis and thought.  Maybe I should reserve judgement until I finish reading those answers.

 

Coming from an engineering lineage and background, I think I tend to look for problems that need to be solved and ways to solve them.  Perhaps this even extends to finding problems where problems do not really exist  I concentrate on the fact that change is necessary in order to improve because improvement is always possible and forget that sometimes the incremental effort necessary to accomplish an improvement is far greater than the value of the improvement gained.

Some things in this class already go well enough that they should not be the focus of efforts to improve but how to prioritize what needs to be changed and what does not?  That is a key question.