I myself like and occasionally use the library made up of my old textbooks. But maybe you’re not me. Rent your textbooks.
Background noise may wreck concentration and give you ulcers. More specifically to how it affects learning:
Several studies have indicated that stress resulting from ongoing white noise can induce the release of cortisol, a hormone that helps to restore homeostasis in the body after a bad experience. Excess cortisol impairs function in the prefrontal cortex—an emotional learning center that helps to regulate “executive” functions such as planning, reasoning and impulse control. Some recent evidence indicates that the prefrontal cortex also stores short-term memories. Changes to this region, therefore, may disrupt a person’s capacity to think clearly and to retain information.
A good reason to study at the library rather than in the laundromat.
Working at a community college is a great place to learn about teaching. Much more so than at the four-year places I’ve studied and worked, my community colege puts a lot of resources, formally and informally, into helping its faculty members develop as educators.
One thing that gets mentioned within the first five minutes of many discussions of teaching is that students vary in learning style. Some students learn best parsing sentences out of lectures and textbooks, while others learn best building physical models and molding objects our of clay. My own blogroll includes a link to a quiz where you can work out what your own style is.
I myself don’t keep up with the education literature, so I was surprised to learn that the usefulness of learning styles inspires some disagreement. People don’t seem to dispute that students have different preferences in how their information comes to them. Some students really do absorb visual diagrams better than others. But students’ preferences don’t always translate into differences in which delivery methods work best for them. It may be that some material is best delivered in particular ways, regardless of students’ learning preferences. That makes sense. Just because a particular student is a strongly verbal learner doesn’t mean that she should learn molecular structure only from textbooks and shouldn’t bother buying one of those stick-and-ball molecular-model kits.
None of this lets professors off any hooks, however, and we should still be trying to present our material in a variety of ways. If only to encourage breadth of thinking, we should be presenting population genetics both as equations on the blackboard and as moving dots in computer simulations.
You get your test back, and you can’t believe you got that one question wrong. You ask you prof, “Isn’t my answer correct?” and you show your prof the highlighted textbook passage that proves your case. Your prof says, “Yes, your answer is correct, but it’s not the best answer.” Your silent response: WTF??
The “best” answer: the bane of conscientious students. How are you supposed to judge what’s best and what’s merely right? What does it even mean for one correct answer to be better than another correct answer? For all of you who have fallen victim to the best, I offer this taxonomy of the less-than-best.
- The uninterestingly true answer. Any halfway decent exam question is trying to get at some halfway interesting scientific point. If you read an answer to which your first reaction is, “Duh,” keep looking for better answers. Look for the most interesting (and by interesting, I mean most relevant to other scientific concepts and explanations) answers. Hint: interestingness is occasionally positively correlated with wordiness. Example: Oxygen is (a) a substance, (b) an element, or (c) a highly electronegative element.
- The partially true answer. If an answer gets at only part of what’s interesting about some concept, expect other answers also to be correct — and then look for an answer that reads, “All of the above,” or, “A, C, and D are true.” Example: Ribosomes are (a) made of amino acids, (b) made of carbohydrates, (c) made of RNA, or (d) made of amino acids and RNA.
- The accidentally true answer. Deserts (a) tend to have high biodiversity, (b) can be found at high latitude, (c) have very low precipitation, or (d) have intermediate to high precipitation. Clearly (c) is correct. But the Antarctic polar desert is also a desert, so (b) is also technically correct. Will your prof remember that there’s a desert at 90 degrees south? It depends on what sort of class it is, but I guarantee that the prof remembers that deserts have low precipitation. So choose (b) at your own risk. You might get the points or not, but at least you’ll know deep down that you got it right.
The main thing to keep in mind is that you must read all of the choices before choosing one. Don’t despair of having to read the prof’s mind, because you don’t have to. Simply remember that scientists are less concerned with true and false than they are with more interesting and less interesting.
Filed under: tips | Tags: concept maps, definitions, exams, sleep, The Big Picture
Students here are starting to think about final exams. You’ll get no lectures from me about how the time to think about finals is all semester. In my mind, in the ideal world you work your butt off for all the quizzes and midterms, and then the final is cake.
That’s no consolation for those of you who don’t live in my pedagogical fantasy world, so here’s concrete advice for your concrete world.
- Party. Get three or four of your classmates together. Order a couple of pizzas. Resolve to talk about nothing but science, and then do that: talk about nothing but science. Quiz each other. Predict exam questions. Find a blaockboard and draw a few concept maps. There’s no substitute for studying in a group, partly because you keep each other awake and engaged, and partly because the only way to see the gaps in your knowledge is to have other people point them out.
- Think big-picture. The final exam is the prof’s opportunity to pull some threads together, to explore how entire textbook chapters relate to each other. Think about some of these big-picture issues. A good way to start your thinking: try to figure out why you were required to learn what you learned. How did learning about polar covalent bonds help you later to understand protein structure? How does understanding protein structure help you understand Mendelian genetics? And why bother understanding Mendelian genetics, anyway? Sometimes the real answer is, “Because it fills out the semester,” but usually it’s something like, “Because it’s part of understanding some other big thing.” Like inheritance patterns of human genetic diseases.
- Study sentences, not definitions. The time for definitions is over. It’s now time for you to which contexts call for which words and phrases. (Even if you’re shaky on the definitions, learning how scientists actually use the words will help you shore up the definitions.) Read textbook chapters out loud, and pay attention to how the boldfaced words are used. Look for fine distinctions among related terms, and try to internalize them. Practice using the terms casually in conversation.
- Teach. During your pizza party, take turns teaching key concepts in detail and at length. Do it as an imitate-the-prof contest, play Keyword Bingo, whatever. Nothing is as good at moving information into long-term memory as forming sentences and then physically saying those sentences.
- Sleep. No all-nighters. Questions on final exams are frequently big synthesis questions, so the most important thing is to keep your mind sharp. A good night’s sleep does that.
In an introductory gen-bio course, there comes a time when you stop learning structures and mechanisms for a while and start doing word-problems. Generally this happens after you finish with meiosis or gene regulation. All of a sudden, people are asking you to figure out how likely someone’s kids are to be color-blind, or whether you think someone’s parents have type-AB blood. You’re given a bunch of problem-solving tools — the Punnett square, pedigree analysis, a few equations that together make up the Hardy-Weinberg population-genetics model — but how do you keep straight which one to use in which situation?
Think of these problem-solving tools as just that: tools. Better yet, think about household appliances. Appliances take inputs and give outputs. A washer takes dirty, dry clothes as input and gives clean, wet clothes as output. A dryer takes clean, wet clothes as input and gives clean dry clothes as output. (And if you want to round out the cycle, your daily life takes clean dry clothes and gives dirty dry clothes.)
If someone gives you dirty, dry clothes and asks for clean, wet clothes, look over your list of appliances’ inputs and outputs and choose the appropriate tool. In this case, it’s easy: the washer.
But what if there isn’t a tool that does what you need? Someone gives you dirty, dry clothes and wants clean, dry clothes. In this case, you have to work backward from the result you need. Which tool gives you the result you want, which in this case is clean, dry clothes? The dryer, but the dryer needs clean, wet clothes. So: find the tool that gives you what the dryer needs. You’ll find that the washer gives you what the dryer needs, and the washer happens to take as input exactly what you’re given: clean, dirty clothes. Bingo, you have a path from what you’re given to what you need.
Any biology word problem will tell you what you’re given and what you’re to find. Maybe you’re given some parents’ phenotypes and you’re to find the phenotype ratios of the offspring. Work backward from the result you need: you need offspring phenotype ratios, so what gives you that? You need offspring genotype ratios. What gives you offspring genotype ratios? A Punnett square. What do you need to do a Punnett square? You need parents’ genotypes. What do you need to get parents’ genotypes? Hopefully you can figure them out from the parents’ phenotypes. If you can figure it out, then you have a path: parents’ phenotypes to parents’ genotypes to Punnett square to offspring genotype ratios to offspring phenotype ratios to an A in the class.
Peel that roach from off your shoe and send it to microscope-manufacturers ASPEX Corp. They’ll make a free scanning electron micrograph of it and post it on their web site.
And now I must go to the sushi shop and then to the post office.
You have to talk like a scientist to think like a scientist. Use the words, pronounce them more-or-less right, know how to string the words together to make coherent sentences.
Why? Because built into the words themselves are the very concepts and even arguments that clarify what the words mean and how to use them. When scientists try to describe some new structure or concept, they typically don’t make up new words by stringing random letters together. They build words out of meaningful bits and pieces, and which pieces they choose says something about which concepts the scientist thinks is important to understanding what’s going on.
Take for example megasprorangium. It’s a relatively large (mega-) container (-angium) for spores, on ferns and similar plants. Every part of the word is there to contrast the megasproangium with another structure. It’s not actually large (think on the order of 6mm), but the fact that it’s called mega- something should give you a clue that it’s contrasted with the microsporangium. It’s a sporangium, to contrast it with something called a gametangium (a container — producer, really — for gametes). It’s the -angium to make the point that it’s not the spores themselves, but the structure that surrounds them.
So, how do you learn to talk like a scientist? How do you learn how roll those technical terms and phrases off your tongue like a pizza order? You practice. Read aloud from your textbook. (You could read aloud from a scientific article, but scientists don’t actually talk the way they write when they’re trying to impress journal-article reviewers.)
Okay, but how do you read out loud when you trip over half the words in each sentence? My advice:
- Remember that your tripping is exactly what your reading aloud is supposed to rectify.
- When you come to a big technical word, don’t sound it out. Morph it out. Break it into morphemes, the meaningful units that have been strung together to make the word. Pronounce each morpheme as best as you can.
- As you say the word, try to figure out what the word means based on the morphemes. Then confirm your guess in the rest of the sentence.
- When you start morphing out words, many of the scientific morphemes may be unfamiliar with you. They won’t for long. Give yourself a few reading sessions, and soon you’ll start recognizing and automatically parsing the morphemes that are commonly used by scientists in your field.
- And don’t worry about whether you’re actually pronouncing the word wrong. All that matters is that you’ve broken down the meaning correctly. I hear scientists differing all the time on how to pronounce common scientific words — telomerase, prion, protein (old-timers sometimes say PRO-tee-in, highlighting the -in suffix which appears in specific protein names) — with no embarrassment.
It took me a whole day of tweaking, and here it is: my industrial-melanism demo. Enjoy.
I have some new (actually, old) demos up:
I’ve used these demos for years, and the students who actually spend some time playing around with them seem to get a lot from them.
As always, scroll down for the documentation. And if the applet doesn’t work for you, refresh the page or change browsers.
(A few others of my demos are still available where I used to work. Who knows when they’ll take that page down.)
