[Itech] Fwd: Tomorrow's Professor eNewsletter: 1375. Driven to Distraction

Sat Jan 10 17:23:42 EST 2015

Graduates,

Thought this might be of interest.

Dr. Franklin

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Richard Reis < reis at stanford.edu 
>
Date: Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 6:02 PM
Subject: Tomorrow's Professor eNewsletter: 1375. Driven to Distraction
To: tomorrows-professor at lists.stanford.edu 
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< http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/enewsletter.php?msgno=1375 
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Tomorrow's Professor eNewsletter, Sponsored by Stanford Center for Teaching
and Learning]
*From texting to tardiness to cheating, incivility and misconduct can
disrupt learning. Here are some tips for controlling a class.*

1375. Driven to Distraction

*Folks:*

[image: Rick Reis]The posting below gives some great tips on how to deal
with distracting behavior in class.  It is by Mary Lord, deputy editor of
Prism, and is from the October 2014 issue of Prism, the magazine of the
American Society for Engineering Education. [www.asee.org] 1818 N Street,
N.W., Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036-2479. ©Copyright 2013. All rights
reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis reis at stanford.edu 
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Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning

--------- 1,620 words ----------

Drive to Distraction

> From texting to tardiness to cheating, incivility and misconduct can 
disrupt learning. Here are some tips for controlling a class.

Thomas Shepard beams out at his audience of junior faculty members before
delivering some unvarnished advice that he could have used as a new
teacher. "How many of you have had students cheat on homework?" he asks.
Most hands shoot up. "What about on finals?" About 20 percent indicate yes.
"No school is immune," says the University of St. Thomas engineering
professor, warning that academic misconduct, requests for extensions or
accommodations, tardiness, and other everyday hurdles can "nickel-and-dime
your time" to the point of detracting from teaching, research, and service.

Ask instructors to name their biggest challenge, and classroom distractions
very likely would top most lists. Even experienced engineering educators
must compete for students' attention against social media and texting.
Classroom management has become so vexing that ASEE's 2014 annual
conference devoted several sessions to the topic, including Shepard's panel
presentation, "I Did Not Anticipate This: Experiences From the Early Years."

Research has documented an increase in disruptive behavior and cheating by
students over the past 20 years. And it's not just among weaker students.
So intense has grade pressure become that top GPA earners are also found to
cheat. Engineering is cited as among the top five disciplines for
misconduct, with some 80 percent of engineering majors reporting having
cheated at least once. (Only business students were higher.) "Faculty come
to higher education well versed in their subject matter but largely
unprepared to successfully confront and manage disruptive behavior,"
observe Jumoke Oluwakemi (or "Kemi") Ladeji-Osias, an associate professor
of electrical and computer engineering at Morgan State University, and her
colleague, Anita M. Wells, in a conference paper.

What students consider cheating can vary even within departments. A study
by Gouranga Banik, chair and professor of civil and architectural
engineering at Tennessee State University, found that construction
management majors were less likely to see anything wrong with taking an
exam for someone else than the department's undergraduates as a whole.

The changing format of the modern engineering classroom, which spans
traditional lecture halls to online courses and "flipped" classes, only
exacerbates the challenge of maintaining decorum. Some schools have beefed
up teacher training programs. Last year, for example, Morgan State's
Ladeji-Osias led a 90-minute in-service workshop on best classroom
management practices with the university's counseling director. The
session, which included scenarios for handling students who were rude or
violent, or who seemed to be drunk or on drugs, revealed that some faculty
had limited awareness of common mental-health conditions and that
engineering students often used counseling services a lot.

Such experiences are beginning to yield some research-proven rules of
thumb, however. Here are some tips for ensuring a productive classroom
environment:

1. Halt bad behavior before it starts.

"Set the expectations early," in writing and verbally, recommends
Ladeji-Osias, who says policies and requirements should be communicated on
the first day of class. "You can always loosen up, but you have to
establish what the boundaries are." The syllabus, for example, should
direct students to university resources where they can learn more about
academic expectations and penalties for misconduct. Signal your intention
to use plagiarism-detecting software on written and computer-programming
assignments. Emphasizing the professional and ethical responsibilities of
engineers, as ABET requires, also helps build a communitywide sense of
right and wrong.

Research shows that students are more likely to rationalize misconduct if
they feel the instruction is poor, lecture confusing, or workload
unreasonable. Underscoring the relevance of the material and learning
objectives can boost motivation and reduce the urge to cheat, says St.
Thomas's Shepard, who goes over the university's academic integrity
policies and explains the consequences of cheating along with the syllabus.
Give students "time to read the policy word for word on the first day of
class," and answer any questions, he says. Faculty also should "make a
point to read and understand their university's academic misconduct policy"
as well as know their authority to fail or otherwise penalize cheaters.

Katie Siek, an associate professor of informatics and computer science at
Indiana University, finds that cheating in her project-based classes
typically comes from students "borrowing" code or coasting on their
teammates' coattails. To combat the former, she makes students complete the
university's plagiarism test during the first week of school. Peer reviews
in which teams must divvy up an imaginary $1,000 bonus have eliminated the
latter by compelling students to justify their contributions.

2. Decrease anonymity.

Faculty who get to know their students tend to have less conflict in the
classroom or hostile discourse online, report Morgan State's Ladeji-Osias
and Wells. Calling on students by name makes an instructor seem more
approachable and thus more likely to gain their respect. Large lecture
class? Scheduling time to meet individually with students can foster
rapport.

3. Encourage active learning.

Classes that include peer-to-peer learning have fewer incidents of rude or
unethical behavior, research indicates, because students tend to take more
responsibility and hold each other accountable. Active learning and
small-group work can reduce chatting and inattentiveness even in large
classes, say Ladeji-Osias and Wells.

Bridget Smyser, an assistant academic specialist and director of
Northeastern University's mechanical and industrial engineering labs, has
students in her third-year Measurements and Analysis course do two or three
in-class activities per lecture. "That helps with keeping people focused on
the lecture," she explains. Smyser also walks around "a lot," checking to
see who's lost, finished, or merely absorbed in technology - like the
student she caught watching a hockey game.

4. Make it harder to cheat.

The availability of solutions to textbook problems on the Internet makes it
hard for engineering educators to directly address cheating on homework -
typically an issue with first- and second-year students. St. Thomas's
Shepard points to research on the value of ungraded assignments, increasing
the weight of projects, and either writing your own questions or swapping
problems with instructors at other schools. Other studies have found that
giving harsh warnings against cheating right before a test can reduce
transgressions by 13 percent, with a 25 percent drop for writing multiple
versions of a test. Meanwhile, plagiarism-detection software can cut down
on copy-and-paste essays or computer code.

5. Establish ground rules for disruptive technologies.

Despite studies to the contrary, texting and surfing the Web aren't
considered distractions - or rude - by today's digital denizens. Indeed,
many students view smartphones and tablets as essential tools. A new Baylor
University study of campus cellphone use revealed that female
undergraduates log an astonishing 10 hours a day, and their male
counterparts nearly eight. "Addictions to this seemingly indispensable
piece of technology become an increasingly realistic possibility," noted
lead researcher James Roberts, a business professor.

To minimize withdrawal pains, Indiana's Siek has the class spend Day One
discussing and then voting on what the rules and consequences should be for
"disruptive technologies." The most successful has been a two-minute
texting/phone/email break in the middle of class - which is only 50 minutes
long. "Everyone respects the rule," says Siek. Another class voted to make
violators "sing your text" or website. "I only had to enforce the rule once
and students stopped," she reports.

Some schools, such as Clemson, have a faculty and student "bill of rights"
that includes guarantees of civility.

6. If you can't beat 'em...

Studies suggest that multitasking splits attention and impairs learning.
Northeastern University researchers, for example, found that freshman
engineering students who texted and surfed the Internet performed worse on
content-retention tasks than their undistracted peers. Yet tablets,
smartphones, and other mobile technologies also can be used to promote
deeper engagement and understanding.

Northeastern's Smyser, who got a smartphone only earlier this year, saw
absences plummet, engagement soar, and scores on certain in-class
activities improve after she began permitting tablets and other technology
in her Measurements and Analysis course. Her paper, "Please Play With Your
Phones," describes the evolution from a calculators-only policy in 2010 -
which made in-class problem solving tedious and error-prone - to
encouraging students to bring their own devices. They now take notes on
tablets, use smartphone accelerometer apps to track their commute to class
and graph the data, and conduct hands-on mini-experiments using other free
measurement apps. Students also use their smart devices in independent
projects - all without the college needing to invest heavily in
infrastructure. The benefits of being able to troubleshoot in class are
"huge," says Smyser, who recently added a polling tool called Top Hat that
can handle open-ended questions. The ability to get instant feedback and
correct misconceptions, she says, "means 20 fewer people sending me email
and knocking on my office door" with questions.

7. Address disruptive behavior immediately.

Faculty and students agree that ignoring incivility is the least effective
approach for halting it. Ladeji-Osias and Wells recommend confronting
inattentive students in private or refocusing the class by using
think/pair/share or other active-learning techniques. "Be willing to end
the class," they advise, noting that severe disruptions, such as threats of
violence, may leave faculty members no option but to stop the lecture and
contact campus security.

In their teaching workshops, Richard M. Felder, a retired chemical
engineering professor from North Carolina State University, and his wife,
Rebecca Brent, ask participants to brainstorm responses to such everyday
disruptions as students strolling in late, chatting loudly, or sleeping.
Suggestions typically include ignoring the problem, throwing chalk, or
ejecting the miscreants. Ironically, no one ever recommends asking the
offenders politely but firmly to stop their rude behavior. "It's almost as
if instructors don't know it's legal to do it," wrote Felder and Brent in a
column. "It is legal. And it works." So does embarrassment. To tune out
that hockey game, Northeastern's Smyser needed just one word: "Really?!"
         "Desktop faculty development 100 times per year."
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*"A teacher affects eternity; [she]he can never tell where the influence
stops." - Henry Adams*Dr. Teresa Franklin
Director, The OHIO Group
Professor, Instructional Technology
Fulbright Research Scholar to Turkey 2013-14
Department of Educational Studies
The Gladys W. and David H. Patton College of Education
Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701
740-541-8847 (cell)
also: franklinteresa at gmail.com 
*~~~~~~Ohio University -- The best student-centered learning *experience in
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[Itech] Fwd: Tomorrow's Professor eNewsletter: 1375. Driven to Distraction

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