Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Taking Notes in My Courses

I tend to give alot of notes and some students have expressed frustration that the act of note taking prevents them from actually learning. That is pretty much why I am going to the Tablet PC this year and will drop the course notes on the website. I would note however that the issue of learning and note taking has been the subject of academic research.

Teaching Tips: Strategies, Research,and Theory for College and University Teachers
by Wilbert J. McKeachie; D.C.Heath and Company, 1994
ISBN # 0-669-19434-4; pages 59 and 60.

"Several studies show that students who take notes remember material better than a control group not taking notes even though the note takers turned in their notes immediately after the lecture. Note taking involves elaboration and transformation of ideas, which increases meaningfulness and retention (Peper and Mayer, 1978; Weiland and Kingbbury, 1979). But note taking has costs as well as benefits. Student strategies of note taking differ. Some students take copious notes; others take none. We know that student information processing capacity is limited; that is, people can take in, understand, and store only so much information in any brief period of time.

Information will be processed more effectively if the student is actively engaged in analyzing and processing the information rather than passively soaking it up.

Students' ability to process information depends upon the degree to which the information can be integrated or "chunked." No one has great ability at handling large numbers of unrelated items in active memory. Thus when students are in an area of new concepts or when the instructor is using language that is not entirely familiar to the students, students may be processing the lecture word by word or phrase by phrase and lose the sense of a sentence or of a paragraph before the end of the thought is reached.

This means that lecturers need to be aware of instances in which new words or concepts are being introduced and to build in greater redundancy as well as pauses during which students can catch up and get appropriate notes.

Snow and Peterson (1980) point out that brighter students benefit more from taking notes than less able students. We believe that this is because the less able students cannot, while they write their notes, keep what they hear in their memories, so that their note taking essentially blocks them from processing parts of the lecture. But this is not simply a matter of intelligence; rather a student's ability to maintain materials in memory while taking notes and even to process and think about relationships between one idea and other ideas depends upon the knowledge or cognitive structures the student has available for organizing and relating the material. Thus the background of the student in the area is probably more important than the student's level of intelligence.

Some faculty members hand out prepared notes or encourage the preparation of notes for students to purchase. Hartley's research, as well as that of Annis (1981) and Kiewra (1989), suggests that a skeletal outline is helpful to students but with detailed notes students relax into passivity. It is better simply to provide an overall framework which they can fill in by selecting important points and interpreting them in their own words, Because student capacity for information processing is limited and because students cannot stop and go over again a confusing part of a lecture, you need to build more redundancy into your lectures than into writing, and you need to build in pauses when students can catch up and think rather than simply struggle to keep up."

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Liberal Arts and Science: Dow Ad "Human Element"

This ad from Dow Chemical Company is really quite good and it escapes the reductionist / positivist tone of most chemical company ads. The recognition that Science is a uniquely human exercise of the will is really a more liberal arts concept than "Big Science". I like it. Now, on the other hand this does not let Dow off the hook for being a multi-national chemical company that has mortgaged the future of our children and grandchildren for short-term financial gain just like the rest of the chemical industry BUT (and it is an important but) they did it because we asked them to. The story of the rise of modernity in the 20th century is in fact the story of the rise of the middle class and their financial, social and environmental impact. All generations before had the crushed poor in service to the exalted rich ("the poor you will have with you alway"). The Industrial Revolution would never have occured without the disposible income of the middle class. For that reason the mellow almost regretful tone of the ad is just right.

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I must admit one thing that bugs me about this ad though. It seems like ages ago I watched the PBS series "The Civil War" when it first came out. The series was one of those shining examples of the power of television to educate on multiple levels at the same time and I was transfixed. The theme music for the series was a haunting melody played on fiddles and guitar called "The Ashokan Farewell". This ad by Dow has a shameless grab at our emotions by creating a similar tune. The link below will give you an idea of what the real tune is like. It is the tune played behind the reading of the letter at the end of the clip. The second link is to a live performance of the actual tune

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Student Chemistry Safety Video

The students that put this video together did a pretty good job but the violence, while amusing, would not be acceptable in any way, even if it is to teach the opposite point.

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Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Dr. Honeydew on the Internet

Youtube video of the banana sharpener skit. Classic.

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CH1013 and CH2113 Science in the News

Things that make you go ... Ick!

This link tells us about the recent proposal that urine should be collected separate from other wastewater (no more standing up guys). What is cool about this is the proposal is that materials be recovered from the collected urine and sold as a cost recovery. This links nicely to our discussion on the chlorination of municiple waters.

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This second link is very cool since it is a very good study on what can be detected in our waterways as a result of our wastewaters. As the authors say ...
The most frequently detected compounds were coprostanol (fecal steroid), cholesterol (plant and animal steroid), N,N-diethyltoluamide (insect repellant), caffeine (stimulant), triclosan (antimicrobial disinfectant), tri(2-chloroethyl)phosphate (fire retardant), and 4-nonylphenol (nonionic detergent metabolite).


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This makes for an interesting insight into the persistence of our chemical wastes relating to organc chemistry.

CH1013 Science in the News

This link is to a report that the pre-1992 British coins now are more valuable for the content of the coin than its face value. As a replacement assignment, re-write the article for Canadian pennies and recalculate the values. The first correct submission will get a value of 10/10 and a get-out-of-quiz card for use anytime in the semester.

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Science in the News - CH1013


This links to a report about the response to a spill of liquid mercury at a school. It gives some context to both the inappropriate behaviour of the student and the excessive response of the HazMat squad. This is related to CH1013 because it discusses the physical and chemical properties of a common element.

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Dr. Honeydew in the News



The good news is that Dr. H. is getting some recognition. The bad news is that he hasn't been seen lately.


Link http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5932369/

Blog Introduction

The intention of this blog is to allow information to flow between the members of the class in my courses.