Wow, this is pretty cool and has lots of application in the Social Sciences as well.  (Economics, Sociology, Education and Psychology—I’m looking at you.)

-M

Michael Sweet, Ph.D.

Director of Instructional Development, Center for Teaching and Learning

MAI 2206  |  Mail Stop G2100  |  (512) 232-1775  |  http://ctl.utexas.edu

From: Team-Based Learning [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jim Sibley
Sent: Monday, December 05, 2011 2:42 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Interesting idea for calculation based application exercises

Hi

I have many faculty I work with.....that struggle a bit to wrap their heads around TBL...when they have traditionally done lots of calculations...and had their students do lots of homework calculations.

Larry gave me a bit of a clue....”make sure you ask students to make  a decision based on the result of the calculation...so they can get very immediate and unambiguous feedback on the calculation answer”....that was helpful....but not completely satisfying

Then I bumped into the book “Ranking Exercises for Physics Students”.....which had an AMAZING IDEA

Get students to do a series of problems (see attached example) then rank order them – most-least/highest-lowest/fastest-slowest....then the reporting is about comparing the rank order

This has allsorts of advantages...since they get to do multiple calculations...on different problems....and they get such clear feedback on ALL their calculations

Nice!


Jim