Bloom's Sixth

Monthly Archives: March 2023

Finding hope in community during another long semester

By Doug Ward

We called it a non-workshop.

Two AI-generated images in bright colors. One has bright floor tiles in an empty classroom. The other has a multicolored swirl with a person walking on one curve.
Infinite Flexibility (Futuristic) No. 1, via Catbird.ai

The goal of the session earlier this month was to offer lunch to faculty members and let them talk about the challenges they continue to face three years into the pandemic.

We also invited Sarah Kirk, director of the KU Psychological Clinic, and Heather Frost, assistant director of Counseling and Psychological Services, to offer perspectives on students.

In an hour of conversation, our non-workshop ended up being a sort of academic stone soup: hearty and fulfilling, if unexpected.

Here’s a summary of some of the discussion and the ideas that emerged. I’ve attributed some material, although the wide-ranging conversation made it impossible to cite everyone who contributed.

Mental health

Typically, use of campus mental health clinics jumps in the two weeks before and the two weeks after spring break (or fall break). There is also a surge at the end of the semester. So if it seems like you and your students are flagging, you probably are.

Backlit person in cape below stone arches
Professors as Superheroes No. 1, via Catbird.ai
  • More people stepping forward. The pandemic drew more attention to and helped destigmatize mental health, encouraging more people to seek help, Frost said. One result is that clinics everywhere are full and not taking new clients. CAPS accepts initial walk-ins, but then students often have to schedule two weeks in advance.
  • Small steps are important when students are anxious. Just doing something can seem daunting when anxiety is high, Kirk said, but taking action is important in overcoming anxiety.
  • Connection is crucial. Connecting with peers and instructors helps give students a sense of belonging. Grad students seem especially glad to have opportunities to interact in person.
    • Making class positive helps students. A feeling of belonging lowers anxiety and makes it more likely that students will attend class.
  • International students and faculty have additional stress. Turmoil in home countries can add to stress, and many international students and faculty feel that they have no one to talk to about those troubles. Fellow students and instructors are often afraid to raise the subject, unintentionally amplifying anxieties. Those from Iran, Ukraine, and Russia are having an especially difficult time right now.
  • Care for yourself. Frost encouraged faculty to listen to themselves and to seek out things they find meaningful. What is something that replenishes your energy? she asked. Students notice when instructors are anxious or fatigued, and that can add to their own stress. So set boundaries and engage in self-care.

Students seem to be working more

The perception among the group was that students were working more hours to earn money. That has added to missed classes, requests for deadline extensions or rescheduling of exams, and a need for incompletes.

Person in a swirling, futuristic landscape bending sideways with hands outstretched, as if in dance
Infinite Flexibility (Futuristic) No. 2, via Catbird.ai
  • KU data. In a message after the meeting, Millinda Fowles, program manager for career and experiential learning, provided some perspective. She said that in the most recent survey of recent graduates, respondents said they worked an average of 22 hours a week while at KU. That’s up from 20 hours a week in previous surveys, with some students saying they worked more than 35 hours a week. In the 2021 National Survey of Student Engagement, KU students were asked whether the jobs they held while enrolled were related to their career plans. Responses were not at all: 32.8%, very little: 13.3%, some: 23%, quite a bit: 14.1% and very much: 16.8%.

Role of inflation. The need to work more isn’t surprising. Inflation has averaged 6% to 7% over the past two years, and food prices have jumped 9.5% just in the past year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to the rental manager Zillow, the median rent of apartments it lists in Lawrence has increased 18% over the past year, to $1,300. Another site, RentCafe, lists average rent at $1,068, with some neighborhoods averaging more than $1,250 and others below $1,000.

  • Hot job market. Bonnie Johnson in public affairs and administration said the job market in that field was so hot that students were taking full-time jobs in the second year of their master’s program. That is wearing them down.
  • Effect on performance. Frost said students’ grades tend to go down if they work more than 20 to 25 hours a week.

Flexibility in classes

Many instructors are struggling with how much flexibility to offer students. They want to help students as much as possible but say that the added flexibility has put more strain on them as faculty members. Kirk agreed, saying that too much flexibility can increase the strain on both students and instructors and that instructors need to find the right amount of flexibility for themselves and their classes.

Swirling mass with a single eye in the middle
Infinite Flexibility (Futuristic) No. 3, via Catbird.ai

Balance structure and flexibility. Flexibility can be helpful, but students need structure and consistency during the semester. One of the best things instructors can do is to have students complete coursework a little at a time. Too much flexibility signals to students that they can let their work slide. If that work piles up, students’ stress increases, decreasing the quality of their work and increasing the chances of failure.

  • Build options into courses. For instance, give students a window for turning in work, with a preferred due date and a final time when work will be accepted. Another option is to allow students to choose among assignment options. For instance, complete six of eight assignments. This gives students an opportunity to skip an assignment if they are overwhelmed. Another option is dropping a low score for an assignment, quiz or exam.
  • Be compassionate with bad news, but also make sure students know there are consequences for missing class, missing work, and turning in shoddy work.
  • Maintain standards. Students need to understand that they are accountable for assigned work. Giving them a constant pass on assignments does them a disservice because they may then be unprepared for future classes and may miss out on skills that are crucial for successful careers.

Sharing the burden

Ali Brox of environmental studies summed up the mood of the group: It’s often a struggle just to get through everything that faculty members need to do each day. The challenges of students are adding to that burden.

The daily burden of teaching has been increasing for years. In addition to class preparation and grading, instructors must learn to use and maintain a Canvas site, handle larger class sizes, keep up with pedagogy, rethink course materials for a more diverse study body, design courses intended to help students learn rather than to simply pass along information, assess student learning, and keep records for evaluation. In short, instructors are trying to help 21st-century students in a university structure created for 19th-century students.

Johnson added a cogent observation: In the past, professors generally had wives to handle the chores at home and secretaries to handle the distracting daily tasks.

There was one thing those professors didn’t have, though: CTE wasn’t there to provide lunch.

Follow-up readings

At the risk of adding to your burden, we offer a few readings that might offer some ideas for pushing through the rest of the semester.

Doug Ward is associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism and mass communications.

In this issue of Pupil, we mock the Age of AI Anxiety

By Doug WardCover of Pupil magazine with an orange-haired person sitting in a booth with a pile of keyboards

We just looked at our office clock and realized that it was already March.

After we did some deep-breathing exercises and some puzzling over what happened to February, we realized the upside of losing track of time:

Spring break is only days – yes, days! – away.

We know how time can drag when you use an office clock as a calendar, though. So to help you get over those extra-long days before break, we offer the latest issue of Pupil magazine.

This is a themed issue, focusing on artificial intelligence, a topic that has generated almost as much academic froth as Prince Harry’s biography and Rhianna’s floating above the precious turf at the Super Bowl and singing “Rude Boy,” which we assumed was a critique of Prince Harry’s book.

OK, so we’re exaggerating about the academic froth, but we will say that we have uncovered a jaw-dropping secret about ChatGPT. It’s so astounding that we are sure it will make the days until break float by with ease.

Doug Ward is associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism and mass communications at the University of Kansas.

Shifting grading strategies to improve equity

By Doug Ward

Martha Oakley couldn’t ignore the data.

The statistics about student success in her discipline were damning, and the success rates elsewhere were just as troubling:

A white woman in a green blouse speaks in front of a white board.
Martha Oakley, a professor of chemistry and associate vice provost at Indiana University, speaks at Beren Auditorium on the KU campus.
  • Women do worse than men in STEM courses but do better than men in other university courses.
  • Students of color, first-generation students, and low-income students have lower success rates than women.
  • The richer students’ parents are, the higher the students’ GPAs are.

“We have no problem failing students but telling ourselves we are doing a good job,” said Oakley, a professor of chemistry and an associate vice provost at Indiana University, Bloomington. “If we are claiming to be excellent but just recreating historical disadvantages, we aren’t really doing anything.”

Oakley spoke to about 40 faculty and staff members last week at a CTE-sponsored session on using mastery-based grading to make STEM courses more equitable. The session was part of a CTE-led initiative financed by a $529,000 grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, with participants from KU working with faculty members from 13 other universities on reducing equity gaps in undergraduate science education.

The work at KU, IU, and other universities is part of a broader cultural shift toward helping students succeed rather than pushing them out if they don’t do well immediately. Most disciplines have been changing their views on student success, but there has been increasing pressure on STEM fields, which have far lower numbers of women and non-white students and professionals than many other fields.

Oakley said she started digging deeper into university data about five years ago after attending a conference sponsored by the Association of American Universities and getting involved in IU’s Center for Learning Analytics and Student Success. She also began working with a multi-university initiative known as Seismic, which focuses on improving inclusiveness in STEM education.

She and some colleagues started by asking questions about the success rates of women in STEM but then recognized that the problem was far wider.

“And so we looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, forget the women. Let’s worry about this bigger problem,’ ” Oakley said. “And we didn’t forget the women. We just had confidence that the things that we would do to address the other groups would also help women.”

Using analytics to guide change

In last week’s talk, she used many findings from Seismic and the IU analytics center as she made a case for changing the approach to teaching in STEM fields. For instance, she said, 20% to 50% of students at large universities fail or withdraw from early chemistry courses, with underrepresented minority students at the high end of that range. Students who receive a B or lower in pre-general chemistry courses have less than a 50-50 chance of succeeding in general chemistry.

She also talked about a personal revelation the data brought about. In 2011, she said, she received a university teaching award, and “by every metric, I knew I was doing my job really well.”

The data she saw a few years later suggested otherwise, showing that 37% of underrepresented students and 24% of the other students in her classes dropped or failed in the year she received the award.

“The major part of the story is we’ve all been trained in our disciplines to teach in a certain way that really was never particularly effective,” Oakley said.

We have learned much about how people learn but have continued with ineffective teaching strategies. That needs to change, she said.

“One really simple thing we can do is to say we only give teaching awards to people who actually demonstrate that their students have learned something,” she said.

A mastery-based approach

To address the problem at IU, Oakley has been experimenting with a mastery-based approach to grading.

The way most of us grade exacerbates inequities, Oakley said. It emphasizes superficial elements (basically memorization) and does nothing to reward learning from mistakes, persistence, or teamwork – “all the things that matter in life.” Grades are also poor predictors of how well students will do in jobs or in graduate school, she said.

Mastery-based grading gives students multiple attempts to demonstrate understanding of course material. It is related to another approach, competency-based learning, which also gives students multiple opportunities but focuses on application rather than simple understanding.

Oakley started shifting her class to mastery-based grading by taking broad learning goals and breaking them into smaller components: things like identifying catalysts and intermediates, using reaction order, and explaining why rates change with temperature. She also eliminated a grading curve. That was especially hard, she said, because she had internalized the notion of grade distributions, an approach that punishes failure and provides little opportunity for students to learn from mistakes.

She still uses quizzes and exams, with students taking quizzes the evening before class and then working in groups the next day to create a quiz key. That helps them learn from mistakes, knowing they will see similar questions on a quiz the following week.

At KU, Chris Fischer and Sarah LeGresley Rush have used a similar approach in physics courses, with results suggesting that a mastery approach helps students learn concepts in ways that stay with them in later engineering courses.

Oakley’s initial work has also showed potential, with DFW rates in her class falling to 8% and the average grade rising to a B. That was better than other sections of the class, although students didn’t do as well in later courses. Oakley isn’t discouraged, though. Rather, she said, she continues to learn from the process, just as her students do.

“We’ve really only scraped the tip of the iceberg,” she said.

Building on experience

Oakley’s advocacy for equity in STEM education is informed by experience. When she started at IU in 1996, she said, she was the only woman in a department of 42. That was isolating and frustrating, she said. Through her work in STEM education, she hopes to improve the opportunities for women and students of color.

“We’ve got to be both equitable and striving for excellence,” she said.

Only through experimentation, failure, and persistence can we start breaking down systemic barriers that have persisted for too long, she said.

“The system is broken,” Oakley said. “We are not ready for the students of the future – or even the present.”

Doug Ward is associate director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an associate professor of journalism and mass communications.

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