MAILING LISTS

I've used TBL for a few years now and only last semester did I encounter
an attendance problem. In all other semesters typically 1 or 2 were
missing from my 30-40 person classes (junior-senior level ones) every day.
But last semester, I had a day or two where 5 to maybe 10 were gone and
that then continued for the rest of the semester. I seemed powerless to do
anything other than saying "attendance matters." In short, I was stumped
on what to do.

This semester I just the following. We had our second class meeting today
and 3 of 33 were gone (one each from 3 of 6 teams in the class). I
e-mailed each missing student and asked them to explain to their teammates
why they were gone. I included e-mail addresses and asked to be cc'ed. I
figure that soon half the teams will know that attendance matters. In
short, I'm trying to set the right norms.

     - Bill


P.S. If other TBL users typically have good attendance like I usually do,
     I wonder if that alone might have affected class evals? I'm thinking
     that in most classes, poorer students aren't in class and they might
     give the bad evals. It is pretty easy to make this claim to
     administrator as most evals include the percent of the class in attendance.

P.P.S. On how lecture doesn't work very well, I really like 
       http://tonydude.us/sdsu_per/articles/Transforming%20Physics%20Education%20-%20Physics%20Today%20November%202005.pdf
       (search for "violin"). Basically, after a non-trivial or 
       counterintuitive fact is presented in lecture, hardly anyone 
       remembered it 15 minutes later!

       It might be worth noting that the first author is a huge 
       name in physics education research; he's both a Nobel Laureate 
       (2001) and U.S. Professor of the Year (2004). He's now Deputy
       Science Adviser to the President (for science education). His
       "Why Not Try a Scientific Approach to Science Education?"
       http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/files/Wieman-Change_Sept-Oct_2007.pdf
       made me really think about my teaching and indirectly got me into
       TBL. He's currently on leave from UBC, where he normally heads the 
       the "Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative"
       http://www.cwsei.ubc.ca/ .


-- 
Bill Goffe
Department of Economics
SUNY Oswego, 416 Mahar Hall
Oswego, NY 13126
315-312-3444(v), 315-312-5444(f)
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