In some ways, Burns had terrible timing: He returned when classes were all online because of Covid-19. That environment, though, gave him freedom to experiment.
That had crystallized for Burns the year before, he recalls, when he decided to try to fix his snowblower. “I did not go and take a course at a community college on small-engine repair,” he said, “and I did not go to the library and look up a textbook on engine maintenance.” He Googled the make of the machine, and watched some videos of people replacing the carburetor. He ordered a new carburetor from Amazon, watched the videos again, and installed it.
That process, Burns realized, is how he learns things — and it’s also how his students were used to learning. He figured he could do something similar in his fluid-mechanics course, by chunking content, delivering it in a variety of formats — including video — and assessing students differently.
The first two pieces were pretty straightforward, Burns said. Course content, after all, is usually already divided up, for instance, into chapters of a textbook. He could deliver a lot of it via short videos, though creating them did take a lot of time. The biggest challenge was moving away from the standard assessment routine of homework and exams. Burns instead gave students a series of short quizzes, which they could take multiple times.
Giving a traditional test feels fair from the vantage point of an instructor, Burns reflected. The students take it at the same time and work in the same room. But their lives outside the test spill into it. Some students might have to find child care to take an evening exam. Others, like one of his children, have ADHD and are under additional stress in a traditional testing environment. So test conditions can be inequitable. They are also artificial: People are rarely required to solve problems under similar pressure, without outside resources, after they graduate. They rarely have to wait for a professor to grade them to understand their own performance.
So Burns designed quizzes that would give instant feedback, and let students take them wherever and whenever they liked. The course was laid out so that students took a quiz in each topic, then each unit, then cross-unit, and finally cumulative. The specifics for each type of quiz varied, but all could be taken repeatedly.
Burns didn’t mind if students talked together about how to solve problems. But he did care if they copied a classmate’s answer and didn’t know how to do it themselves. That meant giving students different problems — from each other and from the previous attempt — to test the same knowledge.
To do that, Burns worked with the engineering school’s IT arm to develop a tool, called MiQuizMaker, that would give students a unique quiz each time they took it. The tool, Burns added, is available for any instructor to use: Those outside the University of Michigan just have to create an account.
That suite of changes led to high performance in the course — all 100 students passed, about 80 percent with an A. Burns is well aware that some colleagues may raise eyebrows at those results. There’s an assumption in academe that putting students through the wringer helps prepare them for high-pressure situations later. But Burns is pleased with the results, and disagrees with the premise that it’s a professor’s job to amp up the stress. “I argue that, really, what makes people perform well under pressure is knowledge and confidence,” he said.
Burns and several co-authors wrote an article about the course redesign and its results that was published recently in Advances in Engineering Education.
Since then, Burns has continued to follow a similar format, with some tweaks. He’s cut down the number of quizzes. And after some students told him they thought they learned more from traditional exams, Burns asked some follow-up questions to try to find out why. It turned out that the students appreciated having to fill out a summary sheet to prepare for their other exams, so he had them start making such sheets.
Lots of professors rethought exams early in the pandemic, because classes were online and students were under so much stress. Have you made lasting changes in your assessment of students? Or are you doing something now different from what you did either during or before remote instruction? Let me know at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and your example may appear in a future issue of the newsletter.
AI, at work
Justin Shaffer, associate dean of undergraduate studies at the Colorado School of Mines, wrote in with a question about teaching and artificial intelligence that I haven’t heard much about: How are you teaching AI as it pertains to your discipline?
“We are looking for insights into how you are instructing students about how AI is actually used by professionals in their fields (e.g., how AI is used to look for tumors in radiological images in medical fields) and not for how you are teaching students how to use it as a tool (as a tutor, for creativity boosts, for help with research, etc).”
I told Shaffer I’d put the question to our readers. Send me your examples: beckie.supiano@chronicle.com. I’ll send them on to Shaffer, and, if we get a good list, with newsletter readers, too.
Too many A’s?
Recently, a couple of high-profile scholars were bemoaning grade inflation in the Ivy League on X. One of them, Steven Pinker, described awarding a quarter of his students at Harvard an A or A-minus two decades ago, and said he’d heard “that in Gen Ed courses, the average is now 80%.”
It’s worth slowing down here for a reminder that just because grades have risen does not necessarily mean that they’ve been inflated. Grade inflation describes a pattern where professors give higher grades than they would have in the past for the same caliber of work, or award students higher grades than they have earned. Grades could go up for other reasons.
It’s also worth noting that grades operate differently at institutions — like Harvard — that admit a tiny fraction of their applicants, and graduate nearly everyone who enrolls, than they do in higher ed broadly.
Still, the discussion made me wonder about your experience with the possibility that causes the most visceral reaction: awarding higher grades than students have earned. Do you feel pressure to do so? If so, who’s applying that pressure, and how? And what has your response been? Let me know: beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
As always, nonsubscribers who register for a free Chronicle account can read two articles a month. Your readership supports our journalism.
— Beckie
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