Friday, 17 July 2009

Dan Ariely: Undergraduate Researcher Made Good!

I've just started reading Dan Ariely's very entertaining book about behavioural economics, Predictably Irrational. In his introduction, Ariely describes a class that he took as an undergraduate at Tel Aviv university which, in his words, 'profoundly changed my outlook on research and largely determined my future.' The class was on brain physiology, and the lecturer was Prof. Hanan Frenk. Ariely writes that struck him most about the course was Frenk's 'attitude to questions and alternative theories.' Here's what was so distinctive:
Many times, when I raised my hand in class or stopped by his office to suggest a different interpretation of some results he had presented, he replied that my theory was indeed a possibility [...] and would then challenge me to propose an empirical test to distinguish it from the conventional theory (p. xi).
During the semester, Prof. Frenk gave his student the resources to test a theory about epilepsy on fifty rats. 'In the end,' he writes, 'it turned out that my theory was wrong, but this did not diminish my enthusiasm.' Ariely now teaches at Duke University, and his blog makes it clear that he's taken Prof. Frenk's example to heart - see this post on the launch of a series of short stories by undergraduates that illustrate principles of behavioural economics.

Thursday, 16 July 2009

LTEA conference-Day 2

Some highlights:

I came in right at the end of Nadine Wills' presentation about widening the university expectation of 'enquiring' academics and students to include enquiring academic-related and administrative staff. Really compelling stuff, and she'll be writing some of it up over the next couple of months.

Phil Askham gave a strikingly candid talk about being charged with the task of 'embedding' good Enquiry-based Learning practice so that it penetrates throughout Sheffield Hallam University's Faculty of Development and Society.

After this, Norman Powell from the Centre for Excellence in Enquiry-based Learning ( CEEBL) at the University of Manchester spoke about the challenges of evaluating Enquiry-based elements that are introduced to modules. He's written a nice document on CEEBL's evaluation strategy, which you can download here.

The presentation just before my talk was a report on some of the goings-on at Sheffield Hallam University's Centre for Promotion of Learner Autonomy (CPLA). There's some SERIOUSLY cool stuff going on here - an 'eco-house' that students built on the roof of a university building, for example. Also, next year they're planning to replace their presentations with a twenty-minute shot (and translated into Spanish) by students.

Daniel Wilding and Paul Taylor from Warwick's Reinvention Centre gave a really good talk about students being part of a research community, in which they pointed out that no less a figure than President Barack Obama has called for research to be an integral part of the undergraduate curriculum. He brought it up in his speech to the National Academy of Sciences, and here's what he said:
The Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation will be launching a joint initiative to inspire tens of thousands of American students to pursue careers in science, engineering and entrepreneurship related to clean energy.

It will support an educational campaign to capture the imagination of young people who can help us meet the energy challenge. It will create research opportunities for undergraduates and educational opportunities for women and minorities who too often have been underrepresented in scientific and technological fields – but are no less capable of inventing the solutions that will help us grow our economy and save our planet. And it will support fellowships, interdisciplinary graduate programs, and partnerships between academic institutions and innovative companies to prepare a generation of Americans to meet this generational challenge. [full text]
Needless to say, there was a lot more to Danny and Paul's presentation than that, but that's pretty cool in itself.

The last paper I saw was John Creighton's absolutely fascinating analysis of research-teaching links, testing for correlation between departmental RAE results and the results of a Student Survey carried out by Reading, which is itself an extremely interesting evaluation instrument. John is the head of Reading's CeTL in Applied Undergraduate Research Skills (CeTL-AURS), who, by the way, hosted the conference. His findings call into question many of the assumption of Hattie and Marsh's often-mentioned (but perhaps seldom read) paper, 'The Relationship Between Research and Teaching: A Meta-Analysis' (Review of Educational Research, Vol. 66, No. 4, 507-542 (1996)).

Tuesday, 14 July 2009

LTEA conference at Whiteknights Campus-Day One!

(The LTEA conference is taking place on the 'Whiteknights' campus of the University of Reading, which put me in mind of The White Company by Arthur Conan Doyle - who's much more famous for Sherlock Holmes)

I just got home from day one of the LTEA conference, where I gave a presentation about my oral history project, 'Teaching the Talk', in collaboration with Adam Smith. Really, Adam gave about 90% of the presentation. I introduced the project, but he talked about being an oral history interviewer, as an undergraduate student - a story that begins with him nearly signing up to the project as a first-year, and ends with him managing an oral history project at St. Catherine's School in Sheffield.

Here's a few highlights from the day:

Ursula McGowan gave an eye-opening presentation about citation, plagiarism, and following the Boyer Commission's much-quoted (and less often followed) recommendation that undergraduates should be treated as 'apprentice researchers'.

Ursula's key point was that, in her words, 'whenever we ask students to cite sources, we are asking them to be researchers,' but that rather than saying 'you're now part of a community of practice, and one of our conventions is that we cite sources, for the following reasons...' we just say 'you've got to cite your sources, or else it's plagiarism, which is unforgivable' (I'm embellishing - her description was more measured). She's designed an excellent audio-narrated powerpoint presentation about plagiarism and academic writing, which puts it in the context of the core functions of academia.

Joanna John talked about an undergraduate survey that's been conducted on the impact of UROPs (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programmes) across the UK. There's a PDF from another UROP powerpoint presentation (this one by Joanna's collaborator, John Ceighton) here. Very interesting stuff about research skills, understandings of what research entailed, and whether or not people wanted to pursue research careers before and after taking part in a UROP. Joanna's based at the 'Applied Undergraduate Research Skills' CETL at Reading (CETL-AURS). Their UROP page is here.

And one more paper: Rhi Smith's talk on the great stuff she's doing with undergraduates at the Museum of English Rural Life.

Wednesday, 8 July 2009

New downloads: Questionnaire and Powerpoint slides

We closed the Undergraduate Survey on 20th June and presented some preliminary findings today at the second annual Institutional Research Conference at Sheffield Hallam University.

We'll be giving another presentation next week at the Learning Through Enquiry Alliance conference at the University of Reading next week- if you won't be there, or just can't wait to hear about our findings, you can download our powerpoint slides as a PDF from our homepage, www.sheffield.ac.uk/lrt. We've also posted a hard copy version of the undergraduate questionnaire- check them out!