The Curmudgeon Speaks

There was kind of an interesting news phenomena to watch yesterday (it may have started a little earlier). National data were released providing the ACT test score means by state. It was reported that North Dakota scores were falling (at an average of 20.7) and were below Minnesota and South Dakota. The national ACT average is 21.1. These are the statistics.

I always tell my students that to interpret research you consider the statistics in combination with the methodology.

Here is the rest of the story or here is the methodology. North Dakota pays for students to take the ACT and expects eligible students to take the exam. I saw a report from Illinois that 10 states have such a requirement (or at least there are 1o states in which greater than 90% take the exam). Illinois evidently had the top average (20.9) among this group. As a comparison, 70% of eligible students in Minnesota took the ACT.

I watched the online posted stories change across the day. Later in the day the news sources were including the data concerning the percentages of students who took the exam. Evidently, the methodology was being explained to the news outlets.

There are always multiple possible interpretations possible when selection differences exists. Consider this as a possibility –  if you included the scores from many students not intending to go to college who also were forced to take this exam in which they have no real stake wouldn’t you kind of expect the group average to be lower.

There is a second version of this story one sometimes hears. ND has SAT scores that are far above the national average. For example, in 2010 the national average math score was 516, North Dakota students scored an average of 594. Of course, only 265 ND students took the exam and these students were likely interested in out of state schools which required the SAT.

Class dismissed.

The Princeton Review has come out with its annual lists of top colleges and UND again appears in the #1 position on one of the lists. The lists rank colleges according to various characteristics and UND tops the list for lowest time spent studying.

This recognition first came to my attention when UND achieved this rank last year and I checked yesterday to just to see if this was some type of fluke. Turns out I was out of town when the news broke locally ( I do see the university responded to this ranking in the GF Herald. ). Sure enough #1 again – a two-peat.

Just so we are clear, this review covers “the nations best colleges” and the University of Iowa and Florida State University appear a little further down the list of institutions with students who claim to study less.  This “honor” must be interpreted in this context.

As a UND faculty member, I started to think about whether I would be more bothered by my institution appearing at the top of the partying or lack of studying lists. I decided I would be more concerned with the lack of studying recognition. Perhaps I subscribe to the work hard, play hard philosophy.

Some of the other data are interesting. The reported average GPA at UND is 3.38. The Curmudgeon in me notes that the notion of a “gentleman’s C” must long have vanished. Perhaps now the default grade for showing up and giving it a try must be a B. However, again, it is important to keep things in context – the GPA listed for Florida State is 3.76. How are such “average” levels of performance even possible.

I really do not know what to make of this. Perhaps it is a kind of adolescent “too cool for school” thing – don’t act like you are really trying or really care. Perhaps it is a function of the sample of individuals willing to respond.

I do think there are serious matters here that should be considered (the previous comments were not really intended to be serious). Academically Adrift was one of the books I read this summer (my public Kindle notes and highlights). This book finds fault with higher education in general feeling that the system often does little to advance higher order thinking skills in students. Again, note that I am being careful with my words. Increasing subject area knowledge and developing higher order thinking skills can be different things. Both faculty and students (and perhaps others) are at fault – students study far too little and faculty are not motivated to do much to change this (my short version). Students understand college to be about socializing and obtaining a credential – a competitive system based on achievement is resisted. The average effort level of students per week is 12 hours. So, to be #1, one might assume many UND students study significant less than this total.

UND has been highly interested in the assessment of various skills of late. The focus is on demonstrating student change rather than establishing enabling conditions students must meet. On the surface this sounds great (demonstrating change), but doing this in a way that is valid with sophisticated cognitive skills is extremely difficult. Perhaps more accurately, it is easy to do this poorly, but very difficult to do at the level that would meet conditions that would be satisfactory to the research community. I have begun to think that the position of expecting each instructor to demonstrate actual change in student advanced cognitive capabilities rather than assuring that certain conditions of instruction have been met is simply the wrong approach. Perhaps we should allow the researchers with the resources to establish quality dependent measures (valid instruments of a given skill) and use these measures with large numbers of instructors and institutions to investigate factors associated with change do their thing. Individual faculty members and most institutions cannot function at this level. We might then use this type of quality assessment work to establish factors that appear to matter. Let the research community squabble over whether such research has really established something of value. Finally, we might encourage others to implement the factors that seem to make a difference.

Despite what  you might think, concrete recommendations do appear. Academically Adrift identified several course characteristics that seemed associated with improvement in higher level skills – reading assignments that averaged 40 pages per week and a writing task resulting in a product of 25 pages or more. Both characteristics in the same course generated even more positive consequences.

I admit that neither of my courses meet these requirements. I beg off the writing standard because, if done well, evaluating 200 and 75, 25 page papers would be an immense task. Failure to meet the reading expectation cannot be justified by my capacity to put in the necessary time. However, I can tell you that expecting students in service courses to read “600” pages results in a very negative reaction from students. Most instructors back off and this is probably the type of complicity on the part of faculty members that the authors of Academically Adrift are describing. As more and more courses reduce the level of commitment that is required, the pressure on the hold outs increases.

Look at it from the perspective of what the Princeton Review seems to describe as the typical UND student –  if you have four or so such courses and have decided you have about 10 hours a week to spend, you might decide you are being abused.

I am looking for some support here. My wife contends I am a poor model for those learning about technology because I am easily frustrated when I can’t get things to work. While she may be describing my behavior correctly, I think there are circumstances in which I have a right to be frustrated.

So, I have finally figured out the source of my frustration. I have a two fold problem. First, I believe what it says. Second, I tend to try to fix things that don’t work. Sometimes I do this before I understand the nature of the problem and this does make things worse. Sometimes this is not my fault (see problem # 1).

Check the two images at the top of this post. The first is the signin for Apple’s MobileMe site and the second is Apple’s signin for the iTunes site. You see in both images where it says sign in with your Apple ID. Wouldn’t you think that your Apple ID was your Apple ID as in there was one of these things? Not so – it turns out the IDs can be different. How was I suppose to know? I kept changing my ID and password, but one or the other of these accounts would not work. It seems I can change the ID and password for iTunes, but only the password for mobileme. Now I realize I must simply treat these accounts as if they were provided by two different companies and enter a different Apple ID for each. I have given up on things being logical.

I rest my case.

I had surgery yesterday morning to repair a hernia I have had for about ten years. It ended up being an easy procedure and I am functioning pretty well today – no heavy lifting. I opened my Gmail account this morning to do some work and happened to glance at the ads. Evidently if I am willing to fly to California I can take advantage of the services of a hernia specialist. No need, I had a great surgeon.

I have been trying to figure out how Google would know to feed me an ad for an online hernia site. I wrote a short email to my brother telling him the surgery went well. I might have used the word once in that email. Of all the words I have written, how would a system know to select this word to post an ad? Isn’t that kind of spooky?

I just realized that in the last month I have had several unique experiences. After all these years, there is still the opportunity to encounter something for the first time.

First, there was the opportunity to spend the night in the original KOA. Then, there was the opportunity to walk past the first Starbucks (Pike’s Place, Seattle). I know I have walked past this site several times, but not while knowing it had a special distinction. I can’t say that I had a coffee at this store because so many folks were interested in that opportunity that the line was too long.

Now, I wonder what could possibly be next. Perhaps the U.S. may default on the debt it owes. It may end up to be quite a month.

The U just switched to the BPOS (Microsoft) mail system. This is true for the entire higher ed system in the state. It clearly was not designed for Mac users.

When my system was installed, the technician set a generic password so I needed to change my password today. On a Mac, when you use your User Name (firstname.lastname@ad.ndus.edu) and web access to request a change in your password, BPOS automatically enters the username you used to login for username in the password change dialog box. This actually makes some sense since it would have to be your actual  username or you would not have been able to login successfully in the first place. However, it turns out that they really don’t mean your username as required to login (I know this is getting confusing), they mean firstname.lastname. Since the system enters the full name and address and not the reduced name automatically and does not allow this field to be modified, it is impossible to change your password because BPOS expects something else and does not think you are authentic.

I have the best minds in the state working on this as we speak. I probably could go into the lab and use a windows machine, but what fun would that me. There is an important principle at stake here. This is about supporting diversity and creativity.  The first suggestion from the expert I was asked to contact was that I use Internet Explorer (hence the title for this post).

I am not impressed with the new system so far.

I have been reading Academically Adrift – a book that I would describe as critical of what should be expected of the years undergraduates spend in college. The core complaint in the book is that so many students show little growth in what the researcher/authors regard as a major goal of higher education – critical thinking. I have some issues with the assumption that higher level skills are discipline neutral and that the general measure used in the study should show change, but that would be a research-based analysis for another time. The point here is that the authors see the failure of growth in capabilities as a collaborative by-product of students wanting to focus their time on nonacademic issues and instructors lowering standards so that their instructional efforts are regarded more positively by students.

So, in the context of attempting to sort through what I think of the arguments in “Academically Adrift”, I encounter this new information about drastic differences in grading patterns across academic programs. The various accounts I have read are particularly critical of Colleges of Education because it appears that courses in education are far easier (or at least are graded far more leniently) than courses in other departments.

Just for the record, my academic home is a department of psychology, but I do teach graduate courses taken by education students. In the report, Psychology is claimed to be one of the more difficult programs (again based on the average grade awarded in psych courses). I must say that I was surprised by the categorization of Psychology and my initial reaction was focused more on some methodological issues in the research. I know for example that many students become Psych majors when they do not find success in other programs. It occurred to me that this might account for the lower GPA in Psych. A scan of the original study used as the basis for some of the commentary, seems to indicate that the GPA is really not the gpa of majors, but the average grade awarded in courses (seems strange to use the term GPA then because I think it implies something else). A second issue that occurred to me regarding Psych courses is that many students from many majors take large survey courses in Psych and grades in these courses are probably lower than in upper division courses taken by majors only. This would not be the case for Education students (few service courses) and probably relatively so for programs like Chemistry. Again, a possible confounding in the interpretation of the data (I always may students that it is important to consider both the statistics and the methodology when interpreting what a study means).

Whatever the department means mean (I mean research is often a matter of carefully understanding the variables that are involved and sometimes not carefully identified – too many uses of “means” here), the fact that the average grade is pretty much an A in some programs is an issue I think should concern academics. One factor that I am always amazed by in my own classes is just how variable student performance is. A consideration that occurs to me given this reality is that I would be not doing my job if I ignored this wide range in performance and awarded grades over a narrow range. Taking this position does not make you popular, but in my opinion you are doing a disservice to those at the top of the distribution if you award students performing at a substantially lower level the same grade. I think this is similar to at least one of the arguments made in Academically Adrift. I am not even certain what to call this – having high standards sounds too elitist. I am not certain this is really about standards – I would describe it as having the guts to be willing to recognize the levels of performance that are there.

Curmudgeonly or not – I think things were different in the old days.

Saturday at the office. I just completed one of my more important Spring tasks – the installation and duct taping of the air conditioner.

We academics get a bad rap. We are considered elitist and impractical. Not me – I can accomplish manly tasks with the best of them. Today I have already changed a tire and used duct tape. What can be more practical?

Duct taping in your air conditioner is not officially sanctioned by the University of North Dakota. The official position is that your air conditioner should be installed permanently. If you use duct tape, you are to use the tape to cover your air conditioner with plastic in the winter to keep out the draft. These are solutions proposed by the folks who go home at 4, don’t work Saturdays, and have offices in the administrative building with central air. We manly types would prefer to be able to see out our window for a few months of the year and we must figure out a way to install a $129 air conditioner we must keep for 5 plus years. Multiple installations and removals are evidently not typical for such equipment and the expandable wings that allow an inexpensive air conditioner to fit any window seem to have a life span of a year or two. Hence, the duct tape. I think if you stand back ten yards or more it looks OK.

It must be a slow time for administrators. They have been sending out notices to faculty, twice so far today, concerning instructor obligations should they assign content that requires an eBook reader. The notice itself offered no specifics (I bite my tongue), but I did locate the federal document (pdf) which appears to have been initially released a year ago. Evidently, we have discovered a concern or maybe no one used an ebook last year.

What is wrong with ebooks/ebook readers? It occurs to me, based on my experience with the Kindle, that ebooks can be more flexible than a traditional book. For example, the Kindle will read the text to me. Perhaps this is not the case with all readers. The document identifies other issues that may require accommodations. Some students have difficulty learning from written material even if they have adequate vision and may require additional assistance.

Part of my confusion regarding the sudden interest of local administrators in ebooks is that I did not receive a similar message indicating that I should be aware of the limitations of conventional text books – the books that cannot read themselves to you and may also be difficult for some students to understand. Maybe when things really slow down we will receive information regarding the limitations of books.