Duke Is Rebuffed in Bid to Shut Down Lacrosse Players’ Blog

I think that the author of the NY Times article started with an urban legend.  See my response at
http://gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/stem-majors-do-not-have-extremely-high-attrition/

I teach College Physics and i am always faced with students weakness in problem solving skills or math. It is not their fault and the educational system keeps repeating the same mistake.
Here is my take on it:
When students in elementary/high school or even college take an exam or being tested in a mathematical concept for example, let’s say functions’ derivatives, you will have some that score 90%, some 75%, some 60%, so you have respectively a 10%, 25% and 40% knowledge gap for those students and the system tells you that they should get an A, C and D !!!! ..and you move on to the next chapter and the same trend occurs with similar knowledge gaps.
The accumulation of these gaps is not linear but a more complicated one that mirrors something called “error addition” (the error on two added values is not the addition of their two errors ) .
Result: by the time students reach college, they have an accumulation of many gaps that they give up in the first semester of a college Math or Physics course!!
Solution: Fill in their gaps by emphasizing on their individual weaknesses in the subject taught.    

http://www.aleks.com/about_aleks/course_products?cmscache=detailed&detailed=gscience8_prepphysic#gscience8_prepphysic

A student is quoted as saying, “I was trying to memorize equations, and engineering’s all about the application, which they really didn’t teach too well,”

The student made an excellent and proper decision to switch to something else.  If you think of the proper task as memorizing instead of understanding, then you should switch.  If you cannot see the potential applications of equations then you should switch.  If you don’t like facing a challenge alone and learning alone, then you should switch.

Face it, if you need to memorize, then a computer can most likely do it faster and better, if not now, then soon. The STEM path is high effort and high risk. Luck is important.
 
Way too many students start a STEM path they should never have started, all because they were lured by fun and games as well as misleading claims.  A recent overly optimistic Georgetown study claims 4.4% of all jobs are STEM jobs.  With Moore’s Law, globalization, “Winner-take-all” markets, and the march of software that sees programs like CompHEP calculating Feynman Diagrams (doing what Physics Ph.D.students used to do) maybe 5% of students should start as STEM majors, but maybe only 1% should expect a half-decent STEM job at the end.  A 2010 Royal Society study found the odds of a UK Science Ph.D. becoming a professor were worse than 200 to 1.
 
Many of the comments on the NYT article at the NYT website are informative.

Within the artificial STEM category, consider chemistry versus chemical engineering (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2008 data for median salary and available number of jobs). Chemistry: $71,070 with 94,100 jobs; chemical engineering: $94,590 with 31,780 jobs.

We definitely see how salaries are kept high by control of admissions within the medical profession; an MD is a lower degree than a PhD but the salaries are higher by far. Medicine is “technology” in the STEM rubric; it in routine practice does not create new knowledge but utilizes science and engineering.

Generally the number of graduates in even broader categories is inversely proportional to median salaries: salaries in the social and behavioral sciences < natural sciences < engineering. Market driven salaries used within academe mirror these salaries.

From a curriculum standpoint, upper level engineering courses rest on prerequisites of math, physics, and chemistry. Whenever enrollments slump in engineering for whatever reason (job opportunities waning with a slowing economy, etc) it is invariably the math, physics, and chemistry faculty and/or their courses that are blamed for being "too hard," "not relevant to engineering education," etc. by engineering faculties. This is not the case when there are more engineering graduates than the market can absorb.

When there are fewer engineering jobs available, engineering faculties tout the benefit of co-ops which may lengthen the duration of engineering education to beyond 4 years by adding related work in, for example, industry. When hiring is high, such talk inevitably disappears as four years is sufficient education to garner not only a job, but among the highest paying of jobs.

So, returning to Robert Talbert's statement "They are merely put off by any kind of work that doesn’t appear to be worth the effort," I concur and would modify the statement slightly in terms of demand and supply by indicating that when national discourse puts the pinch on the number of jobs available post-graduation (no matter how accurate/inaccurate that discourse may be), those who stand to lose the most, ie., those who stand to be highest paid, are those most put off by the work it takes to get them to that job which may not be there at the end of the tunnel. That work includes prerequisite math and science courses which become demonized as scapegoat. It is puzzling why we are unable to understand that a frustration with the availability of employment options leads to blaming education itself, although wrongly so. To buy the blame argument is inexcusable, as it not only undermines quality math and science education in the longer term, but ultimately makes US students less competitive with their global counterparts, thus undermining the US itself.

The blanket, artificial "STEM" rubric, as easily pronounced as it is, needs be rethought, in any case. The four categories of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics constitute highly disparate disciplines from several standpoints.

If the high school courses that the students rate so highly had done their job, the students would know the slope of a line before attending college. I find that students complain simultaneously about math being too abstract and containing too many “word problems” without realizing the inherent contadictions in their own complaints.

I would abolutely love to make my math classes more discussion-based. Doing so, however, requires students to read math material before class, and they won’t do that. Math professors are largely envious of their colleagues in other disciplines who can assign readings and coordinate class discussions. Teaching by example is boring for both teacher and student, but students demand it.

By the way, the K-12 math courses that were more “fun” didn’t get the job done if the students have such poor algebra skills upon entering college.

Yes, but the world of abilities is not linearly ordered – at best partially ordered, e.g., I know and have worked with many gifted people in mathematical physics and gifted people in music. A gift in one of these areas is simply not comparable to the other.

On the other hand, the idea that “mathematics is not interesting enough” sounds like wishful thinking on the part of those who don’t understand it, i.e., “I could have passed
that mathematics course, but I just didn’t find it interesting.” Bull!

There are many of us who are successful in getting our mathematics students to read (or watch screencasts) before class. I’ve done it both with precalculus students and with junior-level applied combinatorics students. I tell them what to read and give them a couple of questions to respond to via the course management system. Five percent of their course grade comes from submitting answers to those questions that show they did the reading. Their answers can be wrong and still get full credit, but I want to see thought. I’ll typically get 65-85% of my students doing the reading assignment before class, which allows me to tailor what I do with them (particularly in terms of clickers and peer instruction).

Students aren’t expert learners yet, so many times when we give them a reading assignment, they have no idea what to make of it or what to do first. I don’t think it’s totally accurate to say “they won’t do it” — it’s not a question of willpower as much as it is about convincing students they’ll get something useful for having done it. Again, students aren’t averse to this kind of work; they are just averse to expending time and energy on something without a clear payoff. Make the payoff clear, and you’ll get a significant amount of cooperation. 

As Mitch says in another reply, there are lots of examples of ways to get students to read successfully. Most involve designing the reading experience so that (1) there’s plenty of structure to help the students know what to read and how to read it, (2) there’s plenty of guidance to help students ask the right questions and do the right work as they read, and (3) there are hard boundaries set so that students who don’t do the reading don’t get bailed out in the class.

It also helps, as Mitch suggests, to assign a light grade to the reading but base it on completeness and effort rather than right/wrong. Generally speaking we don’t expect students to master content through a reading assignment — we expect them to gain some familiarity with the content, which they then master through hard active work (especially if done in class). If you can collect the reading assignments BEFORE class — say, through having them submitted through a LMS — and show the students you can tailor the day’s lesson based on their questions from the reading, then students get the message that you are doing something about their reading questions, and the buy-in really ramps up.

Short version: Most students will do the reading if there is clearly something in it for them and there’s not much risk involved.

The Business Roundtable sponsored a multi-year study of 125,000 Ohio college students in 2 year, 4 year private and public universities to evaluate factors that affect STEM persistence.  Stephen Portch and Allen Proctor were the advisors on the project.  We found tremendous attrition after year one.  Neither class size nor grades seemed to be good determinants.  The greatest attrition was by females.  One interesting, but not statistically strong, finding was that the number of STEM majors by junior year was invariant to changes in the number of that cohort who were STEM majors their freshman year.  This suggested to me that the “gateway” attitude of science prevailed:  only a set number would be admitted into the advanced, necessary courses so that the increase in interested students was frustrated by faculty.  We also saw weak evidence that lack of female professors in STEM was a factor in female attrition.  By the way, for one of our schools which had increased admission standards saw that all the improvement in ACT scores went into non-STEM majors; the ACT average of STEM majors was unchanged over the period so the tougher admissions standards accrued entirely to the benefit of the non-STEM fields.

The problem is that too many math and science courses in college are based on the premise, “If you are smart, you’ll get this; if you need help in understanding it, then you are not smart enough, we don’t want you, we won’t help you, go away.”  I’ve seen this happen over and over and over again.  There are good math and science professors out there, I know; but the culture of their departments and the bad teaching of the rest overwhelm them.  Students who are good at math and science but need assistance transitioning to college level get rebuffed; and even the stars get frustrated at the harsh atmosphere.  What’s fun and stimulating about math and science somehow drops out of intro level college classes; too often, some ill-defined notion of “rigor” seems to preclude engaging students intellectually and coaching them into a place where their suitability for the disciplines could be assessed.  No, I am not talking about remedial work in math and science here; I’m talking about good pedagogy and transitioning students from secondary work into college work and the work of math and science disciplines.  I know that many out there are going to jump all over this entry and tell me the 57 different ways that I am completely wrong; but what I know is what I hear over and over again from students in my advising office.  I’m a scholar too; I also get frustrated at low skills and bad preparation and resistance to hard work among students in my discipline of history; but its also my responsibility to lead students into a different place of thinking about and tackling material than secondary school provides, giving them a chance to love it or not; if I don’t do that I cannot assess them for going on in my discipline.  I also want to add that I was a math and science student in high school myself; I loved calculus, loved physics, and planned to go on in both.

…and how do you define this most unscientific term:  “smart”? 

 How “smart” is someone who can do physics  but can’t write a  coherent essay?  Has a limited vocabulary?  Has never learned a second language?  Is ignorant of how her society and human societies in general function?  Has no clue about human history?  Is not aware of the contribution to knowledge by qualitative methods.  Is not aware of the  existence of qualitative methods and how ultimately both quantitative and qualitative methods intertwine even if you don’t find both in a singel project.  Oh, and is ignorant and looks down at all other fields besides her own, for instance sociology. 

I wonder how many physicists could read Pierrre Bourdieu, for instance?  I woul never say that someone who understands Pierre Bourdieu is more ”smart” than someone who opens one of his books and doesn’t have a clue.  There is no hierarchy here, just different interests and abilitities.  Unfortunately many academics are locked into a single discipline.  Any sociologist would tell you that the obstacle to interdisciplinary studies, or even interdisciplinary respect,  has to do with departemental rivalries and politics.  

Simkins and Maier have edited a volume on JiTT in the last couple of years that’s really nice, too. There’s no math-specific chapter, but they do a good job of laying out the general principles behind just-in-time teaching, common strategies and pitfalls, etc.

manoflamancha, we do seem to come to a common 5% number, though by different paths.  Maybe it is reflective of the impact on young minds of the existence of xenon compounds in contradiction to the Noble Gases orthodoxy.

Though, at times I clearly benefited from the IQ theory that affected thinking back in my school days, IQ tells you nothing or almost nothing about determination, motivation, creativity and a variety of other important aspects. Thomas Edison was considered “addled” by his teacher. He got 3 months of formal education, so was taught at home by his mother. So I believe people should be judged on what they actually do. Which might be, for example, how they do on a calculus exam that is geared towards testing understanding, where their work is examined. But I also doubt Thomas Edison did much calculus.

I’m not going to be one of those people who tell you you’re wrong, because I don’t think you are. It seems like some folks want to make the issue of student engagement not their problem, via two means: 

(1) To make the issue about “smartness”, as you mentioned. 
(2) To make the issue about “preparation”, as other commenters have done. 

If you make this issue about “smartness” then it becomes a tautology: The students who succeed in math and science are the ones who are smart enough, and you can tell who’s smart enough by whether they succeed or not. Not only does this involve a rather specious notion of “smartness”, it also ignores students on the margins who have plenty of potential but need help — students from inner-city schools, first-generation college students, etc. 

If you make it about “preparation” then it becomes an infinite regress. University profs blame the high schools. High schools then blame the middle schools. Middle schools blame the elementary schools. Elementary schools blame the parents. Parents then blame the schools. And on we go. 

Much better to simply deal with reality and ask ourselves: What are some ways that college STEM faculty can enhance our pedagogy to make it challenging, accessible, and engaging — all at the same time — for all students? 

I’ve often thought one of the real issues in teaching mathematics is that those charged with doing so have lost sight of how their own development progressed.  It’s like learning to read or write.  Can you remember how you progressed from being a non-reader to being a reader, much less being able to read one of the great philosophers (or is their writing too hard to understand?), and keep in mind that some great philosophers of times past were well versed in mathematics.  Just as there is a maturity of thought that has to be developed to meaningfully convey complex ideas in philosophy, there is a “mathematical maturity” that has to be developed to handle the increasing levels of abstraction as one progresses from arithmetic, to simple geometry, to basic algebraic equations, to abstract algebra or calculus, and onward to say, modern algebra or real analysis (and beyond).  Sprinkling in applications along the way certainly helps to motivate students (better than “trust me, this is important”), but I think it is more important to reflect on motivation for the abstraction (that all mathematics derives from the simple need to model phenomena somehow never receives the attention it deserves … after all, the primary reason to push calculus down in the curriculum is presumably to help understand the physical phenomena it was developed to model).  The reason we abstract is to remove complication, not add to it, but somehow that seems to get lost as the objective becomes increasing the level of abstraction without revealing the purpose for doing so.  Is mathematics hard?  Yes, but any subject taken in depth shares that characteristic and it takes skilled instruction to pull in the connections that motivate increasing depth.  Is mathematics not interesting enough?  Perhaps, but I think that any subject taken alone will not attract a large following for pursuit in depth.  There have always been people drawn to the power of discovery from one form of abstraction or another, so if mathematics has lost its audience, the fault is with how it is being taught.

I think class size certainly makes a difference. But there are pedagogical choices that profs can make that can make a large lecture course feel and perform like a smaller one. Peer instruction is the pedagogy that I know most about — it was invented by Eric Mazur at Harvard specifically for large, 200-student lecture courses in intro physics. His classic book on the subject is “Peer Instruction: A User’s Guide”. Or if you have an hour, go watch his video “Confessions of a Converted Lecturer” on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI). 

Also have a look at Derek Bruff’s book “Teaching with Classroom Response Systems” (http://amzn.com/0470288930) for a treatment of using simple technology across a variety of pedagogical approaches in large lecture courses. 

mitchkeller, thank you for your comments. You wrote, “Are you saying memorization is what the average student perceives to be the right path in such courses”

Yes. So we agree on that. My Benson Snyder reference was intended to provide support for your more general point in a particular historical context.  But more importantly, I think “rote memorization” is such an ingrained pattern of behavior among the average student that it is not readily susceptible to change.

The thing is, there appears to be an important divergence in thought processes among students.  I have been repeatedly surprised by some students referring to the need for “rote memorization” in a context where it would never have occurred to me.  It takes effort for me to conceptualize that “rote memorization” is what they have probably done throughout K-12, whereas I and my classmates were focused on “understanding” and building an intellectual framework that was built on, broadened and strengthened year after year. It wasn’t “pump and dump”, instead a mosaic of knowledge with new pieces being added to the framework.   With such an outlook, there is little need for memorization, because things tend naturally fit or are exciting and memorable contradictions like xenon compounds.  Math, Physics, Chemistry, Computer Science are interlocked, self-strengthening and synergistic in our world-view. Mental energy is expended understanding the proof, the evidence or the logic and then the payoff when understanding comes and further payoffs as mastery develops.  Some students think that way while others memorize the proof like a parrot.

This difference in students may explain the observation of a bimodal distribution of non-belled, non-manipulated, marks in STEM subjects for STEM majors.  You might see two normal distribution lumps, one centered at 60 and the other at 80.  My current guess is that those at 80 were the “meaning orientation” set, while those at 60 were the “reproducing set”.

My focus on STEM students is due to having observed their plight for more than 40 years, and seeing how they have been UNDERemployed where they have had to work at things that were not their specialty.  I want them to go in with their eyes open, I don’t want them to feel tricked. In my day, many STEM students went down the STEM path with the desire to become scientists, it didn’t happen for most of them, and actually they were in most cases the lucky ones. It is cruel not to let them know the truth.  It may be financially or socially better for STEM students to work at non-STEM jobs, but they should know the odds.  Of course, those in it for the money wouldn’t care as long as the pay is good.

The 2010 Royal Society study reported that 53% of UK Sciences Ph.D.s went for non-STEM work.

Regarding “general education” I think books like Karabel’s “The Chosen” and various studies demonstrating the lack of improvement in “critical thinking” demonstrate that most of those students are NOT interested in “learning”, “education”, “meaning” or “understanding” much of anything, let alone STEM subjects.  Most are interested in fun, good times and a prestigious credential that will make them rich without much effort or thought.

I think we agree that “understanding” is important. We disagree on the target audience. My view is that there are already sufficient numbers of students who love STEM and love “understanding”, but their future is high risk and hard, so there is no need to increase the number who will be hurt in the end.

gmanacheril wrote in another thread, “. . . I had a calculus student who was struggling with her basic algebra and trigonometry skills. When I asked her about her problems she said, ‘I got an A in trigonometry because I baked a pie.’”
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/fixing-k-12-education-in-america-what-it-could-mean-for-higher-education/30762#comment-358700948

If only David Letterman (big time TV talk show host) knew this.  His writers could enliven his traditional Thanksgiving comedy bit with this mother (Guess Mom’s Pies):

Dave: Mom, I understand you got a college degree.
Mom: Yes, Dave.
Dave: Mom, what kind of degree?
Mom: A Math degree.
Dave: A Math degree?!
Mom: Yes, Dave.
[you have to write the rest of the dialogue, the punch line will involve credit for pies, maybe a pun on pi, maybe e**(pi*i) = -1?, I hear he has lots of Harvard grads as writers, as does "The Simpsons"]

Now the really sad thing about, “I got an A in trigonometry because I baked a pie,”  is it is probably literally true, meaning all the student did was put a store bought, industrially manufactured, frozen pie, into the microwave.  Not like Dave’s Mom, who bakes pies from scratch, but then Dave’s Mom is 90 years old and an Indiana U dropout (Dave wasn’t good enough to get into Indiana U). Here is a NYT writer making pie with Dave’s Mom back in 1996:
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/09/garden/at-home-with-dave-s-mom-she-still-thinks-pies-are-easy.html?src=pm

And face it, there are worse ways to game the system than pie. Maybe it was an assignment about pi instead of pie?

Since the reply system here doesn’t let things get too nested, this is a reply to the later post by bscmath78.

I’m not convinced that there’s some innate “meaning orientation” that students have. To me, it comes down to nurture in nature vs. nurture on this one. Because of the way assessments are designed (Every Child Left Behind and standardized testing leading the charge), many students early on find that they can succeed by memorizing and aren’t presented with opportunities to realize that pursuing the meaning is interesting. I suppose you could argue that some don’t need to be inspired to go deeper and understand the meaning, but I would guess most scientists will be able to identify some event or series of events (involving another person) that inspired them to want to understand. And even if nature plays a larger role than I’m allowing here, I don’t think we should write off the ability of nurture to get students interested. However, by the time we’ve got them in HE, they do tend to be of one of the two mindsets you describe, unfortunately, and it’s hard to redirect that.

I wholeheartedly agree that everyone in HE needs to do a better job of preparing students (undergraduates and postgraduates) for the realities of the job market. However, I see no reason to suggest we try to limit how many pursue STEM degrees because there aren’t enough “STEM jobs” by some arbitrary definition of “STEM jobs”. How many English majors or history majors think that they’ll have a job “doing English” or “doing history” when they get their degrees? The sciences, at least, are by definition part of a liberal education, and I don’t have a problem with helping train someone as a scientist and helping them figure out what career options might be out there. (To add another to the list I’ve already started—science communicator. We need people who can write about science for the general public. I would guess that the Royal Society wouldn’t define that as a “STEM job”, but I sure would, even though others might say it’s a job for an English major or journalism major.)

“The 2010 Royal Society study reported that 53% of UK Sciences Ph.D.s went for non-STEM work.”

I’d love to see this study, for two reasons. First, I want to know what their definition of “STEM work” is. Second, the deplorable state of science funding in the UK (both academic and non-academic) likely contributes to that significantly. I know the NSF collects data on those earning doctorates in the US. I would expect the comparable percentage there is much lower, even with the woeful state of science funding in the US. (‘Woeful’ is less bad than ‘deplorable’ in my book.) By the way, this comment comes from a US-educated mathematician currently working in the UK.

mitchkeller, earlier, I wrote, “. . . that ‘rote memorization’ is what they have probably done throughout K-12 . . .,” I didn’t attempt to identify the cause, though since I also wrote, “It was the non-STEM subjects where rote memorization and parroting the answer the teacher wanted, meant success,”  I was thinking that there was typically a general school culture of memorization and conformity.

When one reads of Orwell’s school days one gains the impression that memorization and conformity were the keys to UK private school success, private school scholarships and Oxbridge scholarships. A digression since you are in the UK.

I did not wish to suggest it was “innate” in some, since I found it unpleasant and less effective.  I expect some parents and some teachers try to encourage (or used to) a “meaning orientation.” I think the post-Sputnik PSSC Physics, CHEM Study Chemistry and New Maths were professor-driven attempts to encourage “meaning orientation” in schools, but after great effort and expense they failed. 

Regarding funding, my impression is that the enormous postwar increase in Ph.D. production and then later postdoc positions was largely Federal Government funding driven and that funding largely continues for Ph.D. and postdoc positions but not so much for permanent jobs (since 1970, if not earlier), hence the decades long plight of many STEM students.
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MIT’s David Kaiser provides an interesting perspective in: “Cold War requisitions, scientific manpower, and the production of American physicists after World War II”

http://web.mit.edu/dikaiser/www/Kaiser.ColdWarReq.pdf

It contains interesting bits about physics grad students like:

“Piore had phrased things differently to an advisory group to the Pentagon: ‘Graduate students working part time are slave labor.’”

Sadly, no observations like: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

“Within just one year of the widely-quoted AIP report of 1964, well over twice as many young physicists registered with the AIP placement service than there were jobs available . . .

At the annual April meetings of the APS, held in Washington, D.C., the numbers turned grimmer: 1,010 physicists competed for 63 jobs in 1970, 1,053 for 53 in 1971. . . .

The AIP’s Placement Service Advisory Committee estimated in October 1970 that by July of 1971, the nation’s ‘demand level’ for scientists and engineers would slip to 44 percent what it had been a decade earlier.”
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We had this discussion with some in the Math Department and others and came up with a related option and best consensus–it is very straigtforward and does not require a lot of creativity.  Many voted a corollary that it was too easy for the same reason.

As a Counselor at a Community College, I definitely hear students say they will choose a major easier to “keep the scholarship”.  Math is a discipline that builds on itself and if there are gaps in the learning it is hard to pull out a good grade.  I was intrigued by the idea that students are engaged in high school math/science courses but find it lacking in beginning college courses.  The tradition of very large introductory courses that mainly lecture (particularly because they are so big) and just scratch the surface of numerous topics (because it is a survey course) should be thrown out for smaller, hands-on classes that seek to answer interesting and relevant questions.  Thanks for a very interesting article!

I remember someone did some analysis and said that “Mathematics was the easiest major in my college” because it required the least number of upper division classes.  Being a math major I had to laugh at this.  Classes had to be taken in sequence, and gaps in knowledge would accumulate and eventually become a serious stumbling block.