From kjohnson@math.wisc.edu Tue Oct 17 17:28:13 1995 Received: from lucy.cs.wisc.edu by sea.cs.wisc.edu; Tue, 17 Oct 95 17:28:10 -0500; AA14376 Received: from schaefer.math.wisc.edu by lucy.cs.wisc.edu; Tue, 17 Oct 95 17:28:09 -0500 Received: by schaefer.math.wisc.edu; id AA22917; 4.1/42; Tue, 17 Oct 95 17:30:35 CDT Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 17:30:34 -0500 (CDT) From: "Kurt N. Johnson" To: eta-people@lucy.cs.wisc.edu Subject: 10/17 CCLE meeting Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Notes from Eta meeting ("Team Eta from Outer Space") 10/17: Rich and Chris were absent. We began with a quick review and evaluation of the information on education theory presented at the previous meeting. Kathy said that this material will be used later, over the course of the coming year. She said Bloom's taxonomy could be useful in setting course objectives, and noted that the research for Perry's model was based solely on men. Kathy also showed us Rich's application of Kolb's learning cycle to his class. We then had a brief discussion of post-academic performance of A vs C students. Then came the heart of the meeting: working on creating a problem statement. Each participant made a list of the problems we perceive currently with education, and we compiled them as follows: o Students' excessive concern with grades. o Lack of interest in learning the material. o Overly large classes, which limit teaching style to lecturing. o Students' difficulty in moving from knowledge level to analysis level. o The need for teaching to be relevant in order to get commitment from students. o Shortage of instructional time and faculty preparation time. o Lack of adequate resources, especially textbooks. o Lack of balance in commitment between students and faculty. o Difficulty in achieving both depth and breadth in teaching. o Dilemma as to whether assessment should be based on performance or effort. o Inconsistency among faculty in grading, and grades' lack of relevance outside academia. o Lack of discourse among faculty about teaching philosophy/theory. o Students don't see relevance of course material to "real life". o Overemphasis on rote work, underemphasis on thinking. o Gap between students' preparation and expectations on one hand, and faculty's expectations of them on the other. o Students don't see the potential of their knowledge (their education). o Students don't see the big picture. o Students expect to focus on details instead of on thinking about a body of material as people in that field do. We then attempted to render the gist of this as a concise problem statement. Possible problem statements were: o Students don't learn effectively. o Students aren't learning to apply, analyze, and synthesize information. Further work on this is necessary for the group to achieve a consensus. We have homework due next week: come up with a proposed problem statement. After we agree on a problem statement, which hopefully won't take the whole session but you never know, we will draw a group cause-effect diagram illuminating the problem in the problem statement. Important: Our Oct 24 meeting will be from 8-9:30, as Kathy will be out of town and this time will allow Karen (or Mary?) to join us. -- Kurt Johnson