They say that parents really crack down on their first kid and then lighten up the more they have when they finally realise, "oh, they're not going to die." I have decided that this is probably, to a lesser extent, true with teachers and their classes as well. Yes, most education profs spout the old adage, "don't smile until December." Yet I think there is also a tendency when you are first starting out to expect too much, of both the students and yourself. My first semester teaching linguistics, I actually started the class by writing out my lecture notes before going to class. About halfway through I realised that I didn't really need to do that.
However, many of my standard classroom practices I have been reluctant to give up, often because I am convinced that I had a pretty sound pedagogical basis for them in the first place. One thing that I have always been loathe to try is to purposefully make exams easier, either by replacing essay questions with multiple choice or by allowing cheat sheets or the scandalous "open-book." Then somewhere I read a piece of research that suggested that such innovations don't actually improve student grades substantially, even though the students are certain that they will (I THiNK this may have been published in the Purdue Liberal Arts magazine, but everyone I've talked to about this research says "oh yes, I heard about that too!" And I didn't THiNK that many people actually read the Purdue Liberal Arts magazine).
At first my thought process saw this as confirmation of my choices. Students think this will help them, but there's evidence that it won't. And I don't know of any evidence that suggests that studying for a closed-book exam causes students to understand the material less well than if they had an open-book exam, but I can easily imagine that it might help some students understand some of the material at least a little bit better. Thus, this is the format that has been preferred by almost all educators since Socrates drank hemlock.
But this semester was a little different because I taught the same material under a different course title, for a different department with a different group of students (elementary education majors). I would say the students were taking the class for a different reason too if it weren't for the fact that 99.9% of the students who took my class in the foreign language department listed on their information sheet under "Why are you taking this class?" that "It's required for my major." From the beginning of my teaching experience at Purdue, I was presented with the impression, from multiple sources (including my own substitute teaching in a friend's English linguistics classroom), that the students who take the English version of the course are less well prepared (even, perhaps, less intelligent) than the students who take the foreign language version, and I was explicitly told by the supervising instructor that "you may need to tone down some of what you teach a little bit for them." At least in my class this semester, I have found that the el.ed. students were not quite as bad as everybody said, although the fact that I went into the class with an appropriately toned-down syllabus probably helped.
Still, the worst part (in my view) of this perception of this version of the class is that people seem to start with inordinately lower expectations, particularly when it comes to assignments and exams. When I first taught linguistics, I was given a syllabus prepared by a former teacher of the foreign language class, who had been a visiting instructor from France. It was all I had to go on, so I copied her style of homework (almost) every class period (20 assignments during the semester), project, and three exams plus a cumulative final (all closed-book, of course). Shortly after I began teaching, with my syllabus set beautifully in departmentally-xeroxed stone, someone in the English department forwarded me a sample syllabus from one of their old teachers, to help with my "continued preparation." Their requirements? Three homework assignments (all semester long), a midterm, and a non-cumulative final--both "open-book." Needless to say, that instructor was not from France. Nor was her supervisor from Cuba.
I had hoped to avoid going that far this semester, making most of my changes in the simplification of the problems we would do and in giving a great deal of extra time for the project (though I required them to interview twice as many subjects to compensate for my generosity). But el.ed. students move through the world in these crazy little things called "cohorts." And somebody in the cohort always knows somebody else who's taken such and such class before. And those people talk. So the students sometimes have expectations before you even have your own for what the course will be like. And on the first day of class, one of them asked me, "can we have a cheat sheet on all the tests, or just the final?"
So, sensing that gossip had already turned the tide against my popularity should I stick to my traditional guns, I thought, "what the heck? Let's try something new" and announced that they could make a cheat sheet on a 3x5 index card for each of the tests. After all, how many sample phonology problems can you fit on a 3x5 index card, and what good will they do you anyway in solving another phonology problem if you don't understand the concepts in the first place? That seemed to work well, and to not create an inordinately high bump in the grade distribution. Then I started thinking about the final and what size cheat sheet would be appropriate--both sides of a regular sheet of notebook paper, perhaps? But you should have seen how tiny some of them wrote on those index cards--or even better, printed things out on their computer (in phonetic fonts, even! Less savvy, my foot) and glued to their index cards. So I figured that if they were going to try to cram every detail of the book on the cheat sheet no matter what, I might as well just let them have every detail of the book. And thus I decided to put the open-book research to the test. Since there's relatively little point to asking someone to give examples or definitions of concepts when they can just copy those things out of the book, I reworked a lot of the questions I used to ask in short-answer format into multiple choice questions (about 40% of the exam).
The results? A few people got slightly higher grades than I expected, a few slightly lower, but overall people got what I expected them to get on the tests, and nobody ended up with what I thought was an undeserved grade in the course. The overall distribution was a little bit on the high end--more people got Bs than Cs. And this went counter to some of my past experiences with final exams, but in a very good way: I used to find, more frequently than I liked to, that students could make Cs or Ds on the final (and not just by leaving things blank) and sometimes still get Bs or As in the class. In particular, I would have 80-90% of students getting zero points on the historical linguistics problem--which they ANSWERED--and get intensely frustrated with their inability to grasp these concepts and their poor demonstration of having retained anything that I taught them, then see that they still got to walk away with a high grade in the class. With the open-book test, the students performed comparably to how they did on other homework assignments and tests, leaving me far less depressed at the end.
But what did they RETAIN, you ask? Well, it appears that they retained approximately what they originally got out of doing the homework: an ability to test their understanding of concepts by applying them to doing problems they had not done before, with their book as a guide to help them. And I thought this was a particularly striking thing, because is this not exactly what I want this particular group of students to retain? Granted, my expectations for foreign language majors are going to be higher because they are bringing more experience with languages to the class, but I also expect that they will find a more thorough understanding of linguistics useful to their additional study of their foreign language, and thus I want them to actually master the ability to look at a language and analyse how it works. With el.ed. majors, however, my goals were mostly that they think about sociolinguistic and pedagogical issues surrounding grammar and variation in a new way, that they be exposed to tools they might find useful in teaching, such as how to use a knowledge of phonetics to help a student with a pronunciation difficulty, and that they master really obvious stuff like the difference between a noun and a verb. I knew all along that most of them will never want or need to think about historical linguistics again, nor do they really even need to have their phonetic alphabet memorised. What they need to be able to do is compartmentalise in their brain, "this is the kind of stuff I learned about in linguistics," remember that this knowledge exists, and, if they find in the future that it might be useful to them, know how to go back to their textbook, look up the information, re-read it, remember what it meant, and apply it. Not memorise it. Look it up in the book.
So I found myself really intrigued as an ethnomethodologist while watching my students prepare for and take this exam. First of all, I got far fewer questions before the exam, both during the review days and via e-mail during the week leading up to the test. The students in general seemed less stressed about preparing, and they didn't demand extra office hours or review days as someone almost inevitably does or send me frantic e-mails at 10:00 last night. But they did ask questions during the exam they gave me some insight into the fact that they were using the kinds of thought processes I wanted them to get out of this class and be able to use in the future, like comparing questions to things on previous exams, or even to my actual corrections of other things they had done, and saying "so if you marked this wrong on that test, does this mean now I do it this way?" They were studying the way I would want them to study, but right in front of me, while figuring out test answers at the same time. Are they going to understand the material less because of that simultaneity? I don't know. For some reason, I don't think so.
And this also struck me, because I put so little credence in the plaintive cries of these academics who have gone back to live in college dorms because "we don't realise it, but we've all forgotten what it's like to be a student!" Surely that is not true of me, right? After all, I have been a student for the past 23 STRAIGHT YEARS. That's as long as I lived in Texas. I might as well have a bumper sticker on my car that says "Don't Mess with Student," because these things are that much ingrained in who I am. I understand how they think. Don't I?
That's just it. I understand how I think. I understand how to pass an honours class or an AP test or an SAT or a GRE or to write a master's thesis, all with flying colours. And I understand what it's like to be really good at a lot of stuff, but to have a few things you really suck at, like CHEMISTRY and PHYSICS (or heck, even SYNTAX). But I do not understand what it's like to be really good at a lot of stuff, but to really suck at PHONOLOGY and SOCIOLINGUISTICS (or heck, even SPELLING or IDENTIFYING NOUNS AND VERBS). I do not understand what it is like to be just average in most academic things. And I really do not understand what it is like to have a very hard time with most academic things. But these are all things that, as a teacher, you have to learn to imagine, though you get very little instruction in how to go about imagining them.
You also get very little concrete exposure to how other people experience these things because you rarely, if ever, get to watch your students study. We complain over and over again about the things that students have made it through high school and part of college without knowing. But how do I know they were ever taught these things? I gave a just-for-fun "pop quiz" on Latin and English abbreviations where most of my students said that they had never, ever seen the abbreviations "cf." or "ibid.," which suggests that many of them have not ever actually carefully read a research text with footnotes or endnotes or tried to use a bibliography to find additional relevant sources. I assume they either learned how to do research and write a research paper in high school, and placed out of introductory composition, or that they had to take English 106 and learn how to do those things. But what the heck do they teach in English 106? I haven't sat through it. How do I know?
My mind goes back to high school, when there was no getting out of taking required classes that I sucked at (or maybe could have done better at, but just really didn't like). I remember doing really poorly on a chemistry unit about balancing equations. I asked my teacher for help, and she said, "if your problem is balancing equations, that's not a chemistry problem, that's an algebra problem. You need to go ask your algebra teacher for help." Funny, I thought. I'm not having any problems in algebra class. My algebra teacher seemed to think it was a little strange, too, when one of his A students came to him with chemistry homework and said "the chemistry teacher thinks YOU need to help me understand this." He took all the chemicals out of the equation and turned it into a straight algebra problem, which I had no problem solving. What was the issue, he wondered? And why isn't your chemistry teacher willing to work with you to figure it out, when I don't understand chemistry well enough to help you? Could it be that trying to grasp the nebulous concept of significant figures, and to determine how many places I was supposed to round a multi-decimal point atomic weight to in order to balance the equation was turning an "algebra problem" into a "chemistry problem?" Surely not?!?
On the flip side, when I think about where I actually learned my study skills, I go back to a few sources: parents, of course. A required study skills class in sixth grade. Quite a number of English teachers who explicitly worked on making me a better researcher and writer (though it would be folly to assume that all study skills are a result of knowing how to research and write well). And the biology teacher who made us write up and turn in SQ3R notes for all our readings. SQ3R was a system where we had to "Survey (skim the chapter and take note of the major headings), Question (ask yourself what types of information each section will address), Read, Recite (take notes on the answers to the questions we had just proposed and the main ideas of each section), and Review (summarize the key points)." We had to write out all these steps (except Read) for each chapter that we read and turn them in. The teacher explicitly imposed a method of studying and spent class time going over it to make sure that all the students learned some basic study skills. Which teacher was that again? The English teacher? No, the BIOLOGY teacher. But that wasn't her job, right? Study skills are equivalent to reading mastery, and surely that's an issue for language arts!
Hopefully my "chemistry problem" was an isolated incident (probably related to the chemistry teacher's much-gossiped-about "drinking problem"), but it betrays a bigger issue. Teachers like to think we are only responsible for so much. It is always someone else's job to have taught X, whether X is how to tell a noun from a verb, or how to use an index to find information in a book, or how to be socially aware enough to determine that it is probably not appropriate to throw your Jaffa Cake at the wall during the middle of class (or ever). We expect our students to come to us at this point in their education knowing quite a bit of stuff that we have never directly observed anyone having taught them. And sometimes we get a tad bit uppity at the fact that they don't already know it, and assume it isn't our job to teach it.
But the truth is that a lot of time gets wasted when we don't come right out and say what we want. How many of us have ever graded papers? Lots, right? Like, we've spent inordinate amounts of time losing sleep and missing TV over doing it? And how many of us think most of our students don't even bother to look at the corrections we put on their papers? Most, right? Yet how often do we actively incorporate activities in our classroom where we motivate them to go through those corrections and revise their original work, or look at the corrections while solving a new problem? We do this a bit in foreign language classrooms, though not nearly as often as we might, but I've never really done it in a linguistics class. Of course, I always have time for questions when I give back an exam, and they appear to be flipping through. But didn't I notice how many of those questions were about "how many points was that worth?" and "didn't you take off a couple too many?" rather than "if it's wrong in this question, then how come it was right on this other question on this other assignment?" If not, then I definitely noticed how many of my students don't seem to know that they're expected to use a spell-checker to proofread their assignments before turning them in (even if they are touchy-feely things like journals), and how many hadn't actually seemed to read the book when I asked questions that they were supposed to have known the answers to.
So what I got out of my "experiment" was unsurprising and apparently fair test results, but also an opportunity to watch my students figure things out in a way I have not experienced being able to watch them before. I don't know that the open-book test was inherently better, or that it would be justifiable to do it with every group of students in every circumstance (linguistics majors? Probably not). But I think it met the goals of this class in a way I did not necessarily plan, and opened my eyes to the fact that I could probably do some more direct incorporation of activities in class where they work on problems in front of me so I can see how they're working, or compare corrected problems to new ones, and maybe mix up different kinds of tests in the future to get them to do the same thing in different ways. And did I mention that I was able to grade my 35 13-page exams in just about two hours? Yeah, that was pretty nice, too.
