That question is more salient of late for a couple of reasons. One, the early months of the pandemic showed how disconnected students can feel when there’s no substantial engagement among classmates or between students and professors. Two, a growing body of literature explains how learning is enhanced, and sometimes driven, by a sense that your professor cares about your success.
Matthew Pietryka, an associate professor of political science at Florida State University, and Rebecca Glazier a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, designed a novel experiment to test out the impact of collaborative data projects in four sections of Pietryka’s courses in the spring and fall of 2021. The classes encompassed 120 students in all.
The results, say the two professors, were positive and encouraging. Students reported feeling like they had learned more from these projects compared with other assignments in college, and they also found them more enjoyable. And while the projects took some upfront work to design, they could be automated in such a way as to reduce time costs over the long run while improving connections with students.
So how did this all work? Pietryka taught three courses — “Media & Politics,” “Research Methods,” and “Social Influence in Political Behavior” — in a mix of formats. Some were online, some were in person and some were hybrid. Like a lot of instructors, he was nervous about shifting classes online during the pandemic. He turned to Glazier, author of Connecting in the Online Classroom: Building Rapport Between Teachers and Students, for guidance.
In each course, Pietryka created a project in which students would gather data on some topic and he would aggregate the data and produce personalized reports so students could see how their findings compared with those of their classmates. The projects required some programming (which he shares in the open-source paper he and Glazier wrote), but he also added a level of automation so that he could generate individual student reports without much additional work.
In the “Media & Politics” course, for example, students read the book In Defense of Negativity, which argues that negative advertisements are more valuable for voters than positive ads because they are more policy- and evidence-based. The students were asked to review 15 ads from a presidential election, evaluate them, and code them. Then Pietryka aggregated the results, which he used in a class discussion to talk about what the students had found on average and how those findings matched up with the book’s theories. Each student also received a report showing how their own ratings of negative and positive ads compared with the class average.
In another assignment, students were asked to reflect on their social networks as part of a discussion of network analysis. They entered data on the types of people they interact with in different ways, such as whom they speak to regularly, whom they might ask for career advice, and so on. The aggregate results were shared with the class, then each student received a report showing how their social networks compared with the class average. Was it more racially diverse, for example? Did it tend to skew more toward people of their own age or political affiliation?
Glazier pointed out that this kind of data project could be done in any number of courses. Students in a biology class could track birds or plants. In a poetry class they could analyze and categorize poems based on symbolism. And it doesn’t take a lot of high-end tech or programming knowledge. Students could enter data into a Google form. Then the professor could download it into a Google Sheet, and use a mail merge to send out individual reports. “Whatever way you’re trying to connect,” Glazier said, “if you’re doing it from your own perspective, it will resonate with students.
To evaluate the impact these projects had, the two professors designed surveys that they embedded in each project and the course evaluations. (The in-assignment surveys had a higher response rate, while the course evaluations allowed comparisons among different types of assignments.)
In the surveys, students were asked to compare their collaborative data assignment to other college assignments in terms of how much they had learned from it and how much they had enjoyed it. In all cases they said they had both learned more from the collaborative assignment and enjoyed it more, although enjoyment was rated higher than learning.
When asked to compare the collaborative data assignment to the exams, quizzes, and writing assignments in each of the courses, students rated the data project higher in enjoyment than most other assignments. In terms of being more informative, the results varied, with it being ranked below exams and quizzes in some courses. The professors attributed that to the fact that some essay-based exam questions asked students to synthesize what they had learned during the semester.
In one class, the vast majority of students said that the personalized reports made them feel like the instructor was more invested in their learning, and 63 percent reported that it made them more interested in the material. Pietryka noted that the assignments also fostered livelier class discussions, in part because students could see both their individual results and the class results: “It felt to me that there was more of a community.”
Glazier said it’s important to remember that, at core, this experiment wasn’t about designing a sophisticated technical program, but an authentic assignment that allows students to feel engaged.
“So much of what’s happening in higher ed right now is that huge tech companies are saying, You need to buy our tech software to help students,” she said. “Really it comes down to human connections. I love that Matt and I are subverting all the give-us-all-your-money Big Tech people.”
Pietryka said it’s also a timely response to fears about AI and plagiarism. “What’s nice about these assignments is that you can eliminate this as a threat. The purpose is to engage them in their daily lives. The only right answer is based on their data. That’s not something that ChatGPT has access to.”
The Professor-Student Dynamic
“Google around long enough, and the teaching of college students can seem like an exercise in avoiding a tripwire.” So begins a comprehensive look at the changing power dynamic between students and professors by my colleague Emma Pettit.
Her story was sparked by the high-profile case of an art-history lecturer at Hamline University whose contract was not renewed after a student complained that she had shown depictions of the Prophet Muhammad during an online class. But as Emma talked to a wide range of faculty members, she found a more complicated story about how and why these relationships are changing.
Professors want students to feel included, but that sometimes conflicts with teaching strategies in which, say, a professor plays devil’s advocate in the classroom, or tries to poke holes in students’ reasoning. Students, too, have changing expectations of their professors and of the college experience as a whole. The growth of adjunct faculty and the increased involvement of politicians in the curriculum are also fueling changes to these relationships.
I’m curious to get your take on how the student-professor power dynamic has changed. Share your thoughts with me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com
ICYMI
- What’s it like to be asked by state lawmakers to justify your life’s work? In this Chronicle advice piece, Kelly A. Hogan and Viji Sathy, both experts on inclusive teaching, describe the experience of coming up against the anti-DEI movement in North Carolina.
- In another Chronicle advice piece, James M. Lang discusses new book — well timed to the advent of ChatGPT — that provides a road map to new kinds of writing assignments.
- Will the arrival of generative artificial-intelligence systems force faculty members to change the way they assess student learning? Beckie explores this pressing question in her latest Chronicle story.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
— Beth
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