Teaching Style, Not Computers, Appears To Be Biggest Factor In Classroom Distraction

from the let's-go-to-the-data dept

For many years, we've covered various stories of professors struggling with the idea of students having their laptops open in the classroom. Our argument has always been that the computers themselves are neutral, and it's up to the professors to adapt and make sure their teaching strategies either do a good job incorporating the computers, or come up with ways to keep students' attention. Some have argued that this is an impossible task. A few years back, we even wrote about professors looking to ban computers in classrooms -- which won't do much to actually make boring professors any more interesting. Meanwhile, other professors found that, with a little education, students could learn to pay more attention.

Eric Goldman points us to an interesting discussion of a new empirical study that looked at how law students used computers in the classroom, and the data suggests that there clearly are teaching strategies that can overcome any issues. It also found that, even with laptops, not every student was off surfing celebrity gossip sites while they were supposed to be learning about the law. The study itself is by Kim Novak Morse.

The results from the study reveal that indeed students are off task in class; however, it is not as extensive as we thought, nor is it the population of students we thought it was (of course, this depends on whether you are an optimist or pessimist). Second-year students were off task the most time, at 42% of the entire semester. First-years were off task approximately 35% of the time for the semester while third-years spent approximately 28% of their class time off task. Regarding how many individual students were ON-task at a given instant, roughly 82% of third-years, 69% of first years, and 50% of second-years were NOT misusing their laptops (chart 1).

Another tidbit? Students who had higher LSAT scores tended to be more off-task. I would imagine there are a few possible interpretations of that factoid, including the idea that those who did well on the LSAT are able to grasp some of these topics more quickly (or picked them up elsewhere) and quickly move on to "other tasks," when a professor hits topics they're already familiar with or know they can teach themselves.

There is a rather stunning result on the question of how being off task impacts grades:

While the numbers indicate that students are off-task, my second research question sought to answer whether more off-task behavior might correlate to lower final course grade. Through statistical analysis, the results indicate that there is no correlation between high off-task behavior and lower final course grade (chart 4). Nor is there a correlation between low off-task behavior and higher final course grade. Such results support the idea that students learn outside of class as well as in class and, though they may miss ideas in class due to off-task behavior, they often learn or supplement it through readings, study groups, clinics, etc.

Shorter version: sorry, professor, the relevance of your actual lecture to a student's ability to learn the material might not be that big.

That said, the study also found that certain actions "promoted off-task behavior":

1. Student laptop users tend to go off-task when X-(anything) occurs for 4 minutes or more...
2. When professor is engaged in Socratic method with one student, there is a an increase in off-task behavior by other students
3. When a classmate engages with professor, there is an increase in off-task behavior by other students.
4. When professor is monotone, or, overly uses one linguistic intonation style, students tend to increase off-task behavior
5. Approximately 40 minutes into class, off-task behavior increases.
6. When professor calls on students in expected order, off-task behavior increases.

That shows what to avoid. What about strategies to get people to pay attention? The report has some answers there as well:

1)    “Announcing-the-Good-Stuff” Strategy: Students redirect attention away from off-task behavior when professor provides big-point-summaries, rule formations, definitions, and conclusions. 

“Ultimately, courts look at X...”;  “The upshot is...”

 2)    Using the “Rupture Strategy”: Students decrease off-task behavior when directed to an item in a book, chalkboard, digital presentation, in-class task, etc.

“Look at page X...”;   “On the chalkboard you see...”; 

“On the screen, notice X...”, “Write a brief X...”

3)    “Changing-up-the-Voice” Strategy: Students redirect attention away from off-task behavior when the professor prefaces content with signal phrases like:

“This would be a good exam question...”

“ I want to flag for you...” , “The critical idea here is...”

Or, by using linguistic mannerisms like intonation, especially rising intonation found in questions:

“And, how would you know   X     ?”;  “Because........?”

4)    “Problem-Posing” Strategy: Students redirect attention when the professor asks a problem-solving question to the class (less so than targeting one student).

“How might we determine X...?”

“If we alter X, what might Y?”

5)“Keep-the-Show-Moving” Strategy:

Students redirect attention away from off-task behavior when the professor manages “the duration of any X” so it doesn’t exceed 4-5 minutes. For example, the professor   1) may present info (5 min or less) switch 2) ask a question to the class (5 min or less)  switch 3) direct students to book (5 min or less) switch 4) ask an individual a question and have student respond (5 min or less). switch, etc.  6)“Moving-into-student’s-space” Strategy: Students redirect attention when professor moves toward off-task individuals (but surprisingly only for a short time).

I'm sure it's easy for professors to want to ban computers because they think it's a bad thing that students aren't paying attention to them. However, this study suggests something different: that the students already know they can get a better grasp on the material elsewhere, or they're just not that interested in what's happening in the classroom. The first point means that professors probably shouldn't worry so much about this issue. The second, however is something where many professors might want to focus on improving...

Filed Under: attention, computers, students, teaching

Paramount Wants To Talk To Students About How They're All Thieves & Then Ask For Ideas On What To Do

from the still-not-getting-it dept

As Hollywood struggles to come up for breath and understand the nature of what hit them last month in the SOPA/PIPA debate, it appears they're still thinking that part of this is an "education" issue -- and if they could just tell young people how evil file sharing is that everything would be good. A whole bunch of folks have been passing on variations on the news that Paramount Pictures (owned by Viacom -- one of the major backers of SOPA/PIPA) wants to go talk to college kids. A bunch of universities received:

"an overnight fedex letter from Paramount expressing the extent to which they are ‘humbled’ and ‘surprised’ by the extent of the public reaction to SOPA/PIPA and asking to come to campus to talk to faculty and students about “content theft, its challenges, and possible ways to address it."

Paramount specifically asks to give a "formal presentation followed by an open discussion period or to participate in a class session." First of all, actually having open discussions would be a good first step, because that's been lacking in this whole debate. But, I'm not sure starting off that conversation by referring to copyright infringement as "content theft" is the best way to kick things off. I know that the industry has chosen "content theft" as its moral panic phrase of the year, after they realized that the people they'd unfairly branded as "pirates" had taken back that phrase and turned it to their own advantage.

Why not hold a truly open discussion in which everyone can participate and talk about ideas as to the true nature of the problem? That discussion is happening every day out there on the "wild west" of the internet, if only the folk at the studios actually wanted to join in. Perhaps if they did so, they wouldn't be so terrified of the internet.

Filed Under: pipa, sopa, students
Companies: paramount, viacom

DailyDirt: Can Education Ever Be One-Size-Fits-All?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The national debate over education in the US seems to be gaining more steam. Part of the issue is that funding for education is at a crossroads, and decisions about how to best allocate funds need to be made soon. There don't seem to be any clear solutions so far, but there are plenty of opinions. Here are just a few.

• No Child Left Behind is about to be ousted, as many states are facing far less than 100% proficiency in math and reading skills by 2014. I can haz education, 2? [url]
• "The best thing you can do is get children in front of an extraordinary teacher." There might be a ceteris paribus missing from that statement. [url]
• Smaller class sizes don't seem to necessarily mean kids will learn more... But that doesn't mean class size doesn't matter at all. [url]
• To discover more interesting education-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: classes, education, no child left behind, schools, students, teachers

DailyDirt: Winners!

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Summertime, and the living is easy... but if you're a teenager with an interest in science or engineering, don't waste away your summer watching cartoon re-runs. Here are some kids who've worked on some cool projects outside of school.

• Intel has honored some young innovators in science and engineering with awards and scholarships. Over 6 million young scientists apply to become one of the 1,500 finalists each year. [url]
• Microsoft has named its ImagineCup winners who competed with over 358,000 other students from around the world. The ImagineCup encourages students to build solutions that might help address problems such as: combating diseases, improving education, ensuring environmental sustainability, etc. [url]
• Google has picked three inaugural Google Science Fair winners. These winners were chosen out of over 7,500 entries -- so the odds of winning sound slightly better than some of the more established science/engineering competitions. [url]
• To find more interesting stuff on entrepreneurship, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: awards, innovation, scholarships, students
Companies: google, intel, microsoft

School Allowed To Punish Student For Calling Officials 'Douchebags' On Her Blog

from the eye-of-the-beholder dept

There have been plenty of lawsuits, with widely varying results, concerning the ability of schools to punish or sanction students for activity off-campus. The law here is very much in flux, and the different rulings often depend very much on the specific details of the acts in question. In this latest case, a student who was running for Senior Class Secretary was officially barred from running, from speaking at an assembly for the candidates, and then from accepting the position after she was elected anyway... because she had complained publicly about what happened with a "battle-of-the-bands" event called Jamfest. The details on what happened with Jamfest are a bit disputed, but either way, the student, Avery Doninger, wrote up a blog post that referred to school officials as "douchebags," concerning their actions related to Jamfest, which resulted in the school's actions over the student council election.

The court doesn't appear to have a problem with the school's action, and lawyer John E. Ottaviani, who wrote up the post linked above seems to agree. I'm not so certain. The school seems to have blocked both some of her speech, punished her for her speech and then blocked others from speaking out as well (banning other students from wearing t-shirts in support of Doninger). Yes, schools have the right to discipline students for violating policy, but it seems that a line is crossed when it involves barring expression, which seems clear happened here.

Filed Under: douchebags, free speech, students

200 Students Admit To 'Cheating' On Exam... But Bigger Question Is If It Was Really Cheating Or Studying

from the wait-a-second... dept

A friend passed on this Telegraph story about how 200 students in a Strategic Management class at the University of Central Florida came forward to admit to "cheating" on the midterm exam after the professor in the class, Richard Quinn, gave a lecture where he noted the evidence that about 1/3 of the 600 student class had "cheated" on the exam. He then gave them an option: saying that, if they admitted to cheating within a week,re they would be able to complete the class and the incident would not go on their record and they would not face discipline (they also had to take an ethics class). If they did not, and they were still caught, then they could face expulsion for violating academic integrity policies. You can watch the video of the lecture here: Not surprisingly, the story of 200 students "turning themselves over" made all sorts of headlines. It's a good story of "cheaters" being pressured into 'fessing up... right? It's leading to typical hand-wringing stories about what should we do about cheating in schools. But, as I watched the video, the whole thing started to feel just a little bit off... My main interest was to learn two things: (1) what the students did to cheat and (2) how the professor was identifying who cheated. Both points seemed like pertinent details.

The answer to that first one surprised me. The "cheating" was that students got their hands on the textbook publisher's "testbank" of questions. Many publishers have a testbank that professors can use as sample test questions. But watching Quinn's video, it became clear that in accusing his students of "cheating" he was really admitting that he wasn't actually writing his own tests, but merely pulling questions from a testbank. That struck me as odd -- and I wasn't really sure that what the students did should count as cheating. Taking "sample tests" is a very good way to learn material, and going through a testbank is a good way to practice "sample" questions. It seemed like the bigger issue wasn't what the students did... but what the professor did.

In looking around, it looks like a lot of the students agree. They're saying that the real issue is that Prof. Quinn simply copied questions from the publisher, rather than actually recreating his own test, and noting that this seems like a massive double standard. The professor is allowed to just copy questions from others for his tests? In fact, some of the students have put together a video pointing out that, at the beginning of the year, Prof. Quinn claimed that he had written the test questions himself. As the article notes:

Can the UCF students be blamed for using all the available tools to study for the test? How were the students to know that Quinn would take his questions from the test bank, when he explicitly said that professors do not do so any more? Moreover, why did Quinn tell his students that he is the one who creates the mid-term and final exams, when in fact it wasn’t so?

The students have put together a video pointing out where he said (in the first lecture) that he writes the questions himself: The local student news operation sent a reporter to speak to Quinn and ask him about the double standard and his copying of questions, and Quinn totally ignored him: Now, there's a pretty good chance that some of the students probably knew that Quinn was a lazy professor, who just used testbank questions, rather than writing his own. That's the kind of information that tends to get around. But it's still not clear that using testbank questions to study is really an ethical lapse. Taking sample tests is a good way to practice for an exam and to learn the subject matter. And while those 200 students "confessed," it seems like they did so mainly to avoid getting kicked out of school -- not because they really feel they did anything wrong -- and I might have to agree with them.

We've seen plenty of stories over the years about professors trying to keep up with modern technology -- and I recognize that it's difficult to keep creating new exams for classes. But in this case, it looks like Prof. Quinn barely created anything at all. He just pulled questions from a source that the students had access to as well and copied them verbatim. It would seem that, even if you think the students did wrong here, the Professor was equally negligent. Will he have to sit through an ethics class too?

Filed Under: cheating, ethics, students, tests

School Agrees To Pay Student $33,000 After Teacher Dug Through Her Phone To Find Private Nude Photos

from the privacy dept

The ACLU has announced that a school district in Pennsylvania has settled the case it brought against the district for suspending a student after discovering nude photos on her mobile phone. Apparently, the phone was confiscated after the student used the phone during her homeroom period -- a violation of school policy. That part was fine. Where it became a problem is that the teacher then went through her phone and found some "explicit" photos, described as nude photographs of the girl, which she only had intended to show her boyfriend. The student was then suspended -- and there were threats from prosecutors of charging her with child pornography. The student and the ACLU argued that the school and the teacher had no right to explore the contents of the phone that it had confiscated -- and the school has now agreed to pay $33,000 to settle the lawsuit. As the ACLU notes, this is an area of some confusion, but schools should remember that students do have privacy rights:

The ACLU-PA hoped to use this case to help alert school officials across Pennsylvania to students' privacy rights in their cell phones. Very little case law exists discussing student-cell-phone searches. While the settlement forecloses a court ruling, the case has led the ACLU-PA to contact the Pennsylvania School Boards Association (PSBA), which this week agreed to work with the ACLU towards crafting guidelines for teachers and school officials to help them better handle situations involving student cell phones and other electronic devices without unlawfully invading student privacy. Walczak noted that the goal was to prevent future violations of students' constitutional rights.

However, the overall case is not over, as the ACLU is still pushing forward in a lawsuit against the prosecutor, who is still claiming that the activity of this, and a few other girls, counted as child pornography.

Filed Under: privacy, schools, students

California Pre-Schoolers Getting Tracking Devices

from the let-the-computer-watch-'em dept

Apparently pre-schoolers in Contra Costa County are going to learn from an early age to get used to the idea that their every move will be tracked relentlessly. They're all going to get special jerseys to wear that contain an RFID tag, which will track the kids whereabouts at all times. The claim is it will even track "whether they've eaten or not," though I'm not quite sure how that works. The idea is that this will "free up teachers and administrators who previously had to note on paper files when a child was absent or had eaten." While I'm generally all for technology that makes processes more efficient, I'm not quite sure it makes sense to go full-on Big Brother here. Aren't there better technological solutions for tracking attendance and food intake. What about having the kid (or their parents) sign them in via a computer check-in (which is what I do with my kid)? As a parent, frankly, I don't think I'd be comfortable with a preschool tagging my kid with a tracking device.

Filed Under: california, preschool, students, tracking

Students Overwhelmingly Don't Like Kindle As A Textbook Replacement Option

from the ouch dept

Amazon pitched its Kindle Dx as a perfect replacement from having to lug around heavy textbooks in college, but it seems that the drawbacks to the technology have students pining for the old textbooks (found via Slashdot). In fact, in a survey after using the Kindle Dx for a while, "80 percent of MBA students who participated in Amazon's pilot program said they would not recommend the Kindle DX as a classroom study aid..." And it's not that they don't like ebooks. The same report notes that "more than 90 percent liked it for pleasure reading." Apparently not being able to "scribble notes in the margins, easily highlight passages or fully appreciate color charts and graphics" is sort of a pain for educational settings. Who knew?

Filed Under: ebooks, kindle, students
Companies: amazon

School Laptop Spying Program Has A 'Hacker-Friendly' Security Vulneratibility

from the but,-of-course-it-does dept

It always happens. A technology used for spying on people always opens up security vulnerabilities. Sony's "rootkit" DRM had huge security vulnerabilities that let people do bad things to your computer. And now comes the news that the LANrev system used by the Lower Merion School District to secretly photograph students at home also just happened to have a big security vulnerability that, in theory, made it possible for others to spy on children without them knowing it as well:

The LANrev program contains a vulnerability that would allow someone using the same network as one of the students to install malware on the laptop that could remotely control the computer. An intruder would be able to steal data from the computer or control the laptop webcam to snap surreptitious pictures....

The vulnerability in the LANrev system lies in the symmetric-key encryption it uses for authentication between the client and the server, and isn’t related to the optional Theft Track feature. Therefore, even computers that are not using the theft feature are potentially vulnerable.

The authentication key is stored in the client-side and server software and is fairly easy to decipher, says Frank Heidt, president and CEO of Leviathan. It took Leviathan just a few hours to determine that it’s a stanza from a German poem. The key is the same for every computer using LANrev.

The LANrev client software on a computer is configured to contact a server every minute or so to check in and see if the server has any commands for it. Knowing what the key is would let an attacker who has installed a sniffer on the network intercept that ping and masquerade as the server in communication back to the laptop. It requires the attacker to be on the same network as the target machine -- for example, on a wireless network at the school or anywhere else that offers free Wi-Fi the student might use.

To be fair, there's no evidence that anyone used this hack outside of the researchers who have discovered it, but it still raises more questions about the wisdom of using such software, especially on laptops used by kids.

Filed Under: lower merion, security, spying, students, vulnerability