11:30 AM - On the Use of Reflective Writing Assignments
Anurag Katyal from Palm Beach State College had a great presentation on his use of a variety of readings, prompts, and quotes to get students to reflect on their own math experiences. He referenced Reflective Writing in Mathematics Education Programmes by McNaught (2010), so I'll have to read that at some point. Anurag discussed a variety of assignment logistics (time, length, etc.) he used as part of his continuous improvement of his teaching practice. I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who tinkers.
The big takeaway was Anurag's rubric that he developed with colleagues in the English Department. I'm looking forward to reviewing it (as of 11/21 I haven't gotten a copy yet) and trying to borrow what I can. As I have no training in evaluating written work, my focus has always been evaluating a piece of writing for the student's intent. Are they looking to get this done as quickly as possible, or was the assignment done with sufficient completion, a term I've used in the past to mean:
"Making a good faith attempt at answering all questions in an assignment, showing your work, and completing the entire activity to the best of your ability. If you do not meet this criteria for an assignment that uses sufficient completion you will earn a zero (0) for that assignment. "
I was also impressed by the variety of readings Anurag asked students to complete and reflect on. I'm hoping to get that list and see how I can incorporate them into my courses. I routinely use my LMS's quiz feature for Check-Ins, short assignments asking students for feedback, to reflect, and to answer mathematical questions. Most of the feedback is centered around group work, and most reflection is around questions like "What was the stickiest point?", "What do you wonder?", "What is a question that would build understanding?", "What remaining questions do you have?" I've included some longer form reflections that require a reading, but these are kind of sporadic. It may be nice to organize these smaller reflections, interleaved with these larger reflections in a consistent way, possibly every Friday a bigger reflection....
12:00 - Mathematics Anxiety: What is it? Who has it? What can be done?
There was a good amount of references to look over (math anxiety was first discussed in 1957 by Dreger and Aiken), acknowledgement of cultural differences (China v. US), deficit theory and cognitive interference theory, who has it, and specific actions faculty can take to address it; 10 minute write-out before an exam where students just write what they know, fewer smaller exams, address negative math attitudes, normalize struggle, acknowledge the struggle of famous people, and identify diverse role models. All-in-all, a good session, but nothing really new for me.
12:40 - Using Faculty Collaboration to Design and Improve Corequisite Courses
This was a good session on a Texas' CCs design and implementation of coreq courses. The level of internal organization of the department was the most interesting part of the presentation, as they had faculty teams with faculty leads for college algebra and business math, statistics, and quantitative reasoning (non-STEM) courses. Each of the three courses had different balances of prerequisite content and course content. The college algebra course was fairly front loaded with prereq content, but more and more course content was added over time. The quantitative reasoning course had some weeks where prereq content was the majority, and other weeks where course content was the majority. The stats course had a fairly even split with an equal number of prerequisite topics each week. Below are some diagrams I sketched in my notes;
The presenters had quite a bit of data, but nothing was disaggregated by race. I asked whether they have done so, and they did not. I shared my own experience with not doing the same with an assessment project, and made it pretty clear that we can do better. I got sideways glances from the presenters for the rest of the conference, but I hope I made it clear; we must include equity data in all of our conversations.
I believe I took lunch at this point, at a bar across the street. I talked to a few people over writing questions in MyOpenMath and learned that David Lippman used PHP as the base language to write questions in. Good to know!
1:50 - Hitting the Mark: Organization for Optimal Outcomes
I walked into this session a little late, but Sarah Miller shared her organization methods for both teaching and into a little of her personal life. As someone with the following to-do list for the week, I was definitely interested.
She shared that she has a student intake form that providers her with a range of information about the student. On the back of the form she'll write notes about the student's progress, emails or messages the students sent, and other useful information. This seems close to a case management system an advisor would use for students, but would be really helpful for faculty. Using this she sees patterns, can piece together the student's life, and reach out when necessary.
She shared her methods for organizing her emails. She creates an email folder for each student! In my college's LMS this isn't necessary as you can already look at all the messages a student sent, but in Outlook this would be good only if students emailed me. Since Sarah gets so many emails she uses the 3-2-1-0 method of checking emails 3 times a day, 20 minutes a day, 1 touch. She shared her workflow to decide how to take care of it, or if its a task in itself. I thought that was an interesting way to think about some emails, a bigger project to tackle on its own.
The Thursday Keynote by Francis Su was heartwarming. He really pushed us to remember why we're doing what we're doing; to share a deeply human endeavor with our students. Below is the same (I believe) speech he gave to the MAA in 2017.
After that the exhibit hall opened, and it was a little strange how many people were waiting to get in. I guess there was swag for the first few people who entered? Not my scene. I went back to the hotel, relaxed, and met up with colleagues for dinner. But the night wasn't over, the last session was:
8:30 PM (What was I thinking?) - Procedural and Conceptual Skills in Algebra
My entire grading rubric is based on a balance of procedural skills and conceptual understanding, so I thought this was an important session to go to. I was hoping for something a bit more about how to differentiate these two areas when grading, but the session was about the presenter's work on using a number of psychometric measurements (latent class analysis, distractor analysis, and qualitative analysis of cognitive interviews) to get a better understanding of the relationship between a student's procedural skills and conceptual understanding. I've done a bit of reading on psychometrics, but haven't heard about any of these measures, another thing to read up on.
The latent class analysis piece seems the most interesting, as it would seem to partition students into groups based on their answers. This is a much more advanced version of what I do with my assessment analysis; group students by total scores and look at question averages for low, mid, and high performing student groups. Based on the analysis I may remove questions from grading if no group had a 60% average for a question, and other similar ways to address perceived imbalances of scores. A latent class analysis could give me a better way to separate these students into these groups, but it sounds like I may have to code questions and answers differently... Not sure, hence the reading.
Done with Day 1, not sure how long this review will take me. My wife went to bed 10 minutes ago, and I think I need to follow her lead. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, outrages, accusations, or ideas, you know what to do below.
