An innovated education system

Posted on February 10, 2019 by sgafrouz

An innovated education system has been always my matter of concern as I believe the current teaching system, including tests and grades, cannot help students to foster their potentials to serve the society as their best; but to categorize them in order to identify the most capable ones in specific tasks. The current education system, metaphorically, is like the old story of having rabbits, fishes and pigeons in the same school and ranking them in jumping, swimming and flying altogether. There is no need to teach rabbits the basics of jumping but how to jump better. They can try swimming but no need to get ranked upon their fun experience and for sure they need help for that.

Moreover, the competitive filtering system creates one-dimensional mindsets, for example, smart engineers whose world are just numbers, equations, and codes. Statistically, in a competitive environment, individuals get less time to explore and try other aspects of life like art for the engineering example. On the other hand, a grading system in which the variety of abilities, personality and background of students is not considered, cannot be a proper measure to quantify how much they have learned. The performance of individuals in responding questions is different apart from their knowledge or fluency in the topics. Thus, testing can be a tool to identify the stronger student conditionally, which adversely causes the students to label themselves under titles of good or bad. This grading system could be more advantageous in old school times when individuals had to seek the masters in each skill or science, learn their technics and find a job based on their new mastered skills. Maybe, the employers needed a scale to hire the best ones. With extended resumes and portfolios in our modern day, grades are not demonstrators of the capabilities of the people.

The goal of modern education is to help individuals to achieve their best in their own path, to help students to find the fittest role in which they can be creative while handling responsibilities in our complex society. However, ranking them based on the grades might make them disappointed in fostering their strongest side. In addition, as benefits of technology, students have access to a vast amount of documents to read and learn independently, the help of the instructor can be to optimize the learning during a specific period and this process can differ based on the effort of the student.

Finally, as the human generation is adapting promptly with technology, our educating system has to advance with the same pace as well.

Human Factors view on attention and multitasking

Posted on February 10, 2019 by Nayara Faria

Many people see multitasking as a way of increasing efficiency in our daily life. However, multitasking is a thread of degrading performance. This is true specially in the classroom environment. In simple words, when multitasking we are executing two or more tasks that are not equally important: these are the primary and the secondary tasks.

Let's suppose a common example in the classroom environment:

Primary Task: Main task a person is concentrating on: paying attention on a lecture and taking notes
Secondary Task: Distraction task which has to be executed in parallel: using the cellphone to text

Perfect execution of two parallel tasks is possible but requires learning and depends on several context factors. Usually, automatic tasks that require no attention can have a good time sharing with more difficult tasks. However, being in a classroom involves controlled tasks that require attention. These type of tasks are considered hard and require more attention and cognitive resources. Learning a new subject , taking notes, paying attention to a conversation and texting back are controlled tasks take can not be automate even with practice.

In fact, these tasks are considered in nature and therefore, they are harder to execute in parallel than more distinct ones. When tasks are similar, they compete for same abstract cognitive resources. As humans, we have a fixed pool of available resources. In this way, conflicts between tasks occur when more resources are concurrently requested than available. We do not allocate resources evenly between tasks. If a conversation is more interesting than a task, more cognitive resources will be allocated to this task. In this way, a perfect time-sharing is not possible.

Additionally, most dual tasks require enormous “mental effort”. For instance, if you are trying to learn a difficult subject in class but at the same time you are engaged in a controversial subject with your friends using your cellphone, both tasks require enormous resources. If tasks requirements are greater than your available resources, you start experiencing mental workload. Yes! You can get more exhausted in class by using your cellphone!

What are your thoughts on using cellphones in the classroom vs attention and multitasking?

Comment on Am I in the Right Room? by Changing Lanes again, – Ben Kirkland’s Edu-Blog

Posted on February 10, 2019 by Changing Lanes again, – Ben Kirkland's Edu-Blog

[…] going to switch gears for a minute regarding last week’s post so that I can better see both sides and ask more questions from you, dear reader. It’s kind of a […]

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Comment on Mission Statements by ecsconnection

Posted on February 10, 2019 by ecsconnection

I enjoyed your takeaways from Virginia Tech’s mission statement and your experience thus far. What better way to relate to a mission statement then by experiencing the university firsthand. I have been in graduate school at VT for almost 4 years (masters and now PhD) and I agree that the faculty are very positive component. They are dedicated and have helped shape my experience for the better. I think this plays into personal growth as stated in the mission statement. I wonder if this experience and exposure to research is shared by both undergraduate and graduate students?

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Mindful vs. Mindless Learning: a Case Study

Posted on February 10, 2019 by neginf

To start with, let us define the meaning of these two keywords: mindfulness and mindlessness. According to “Mindful Learning” by Ellen Langer, “mindfulness is a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engages in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context”. On the other hand, when we are mindless we rely on decisions made in the past. As the result, “we are stuck in a single, rigid perspective and oblivious to alternative ways of knowing”.

When it comes to learning, mindful learning is interpreted as an interactive communication between the students and teachers, which engages the students actively thinking about the topic, answering questions, and most importantly asking questions. In contrast, mindless learning pictures teaching as a way to delivering information; therefore, the emphasis is more on what is taught rather than how it is taught. In other words, “mindful learning=active learning”, whereas “mindless learning=passive learning”.

Honestly, I have been a fan of mindless learning for a long while! In particular, when I volunteered to teach an undergraduate course to the computer science major students in summer 2017, I scheduled the semester very heavily to make sure that all the topics are covered and nothing is missed. Although there is nothing wrong with this approach at the first glance, you can imagine how my priorities were geared towards the delivery of information rather than teaching less but more effectively. Interestingly, students did not reflect any issues regarding this approach in their SPOT surveys! This perhaps implies that this attitude has become a common teaching philosophy, so that students did not recognize it as a drawback.

This semester, I am privileged to develop a graduate course in math/computer science with my advisor. As opposed to me, he put his emphasis on the engagement of students through several lab sessions, projects and presentations. In the beginning, I frowned upon his proposed syllabus, which was very different than the standard ones– those basically cover the major sections of a textbook. Instead, he selected fewer topics but added more hands-on projects and Q&A sessions. Furthermore, his presentations are often made of a few slides containing methodologies and formulas followed by several slides on the real-world examples. Expectedly, students are more involved during the class and follow the topics enthusiastically.

One may argue that an undergraduate course is significantly different than a graduate course in terms of the of the opportunities that the instructor have to customize the syllabus. This is a vey legitimate argument. But, what I am willing to accentuate is the paradigm shift from the conventional easy way of passive teaching to the new and challenging way of active teaching. In my opinion, once this philosophy is set, the courseware to make it happen will flourish accordingly.

Comment on Racism, Yearbooks, and the Modern University by splummer

Posted on February 10, 2019 by splummer

I’m so glad you posted about this. My students have been talking about it. My peers have been talking about it. It has a lot of implications, including the role of the university to create save spaces for students. I agree that the existence of these pictures should not be surprising. The politicians’ responses have, in my opinion, been inadequate. Instead of admitting to what they did and apologizing, they have been trying to explain it away. We have all done things we aren’t proud of and most of us have done things that were unenlightened. But we should be able to explain how our life and college experiences have taught us and demonstrated to us the errors of our ways. Trying to blow it off as “a sign of the times” is not acceptable. Individuals need to demonstrate that they have grown and changed as individuals, and I agree that colleges should facilitate and nourish that personal growth.