 Professor Fartik had asked me to talk a little bit about some effective teaching and learning strategies that we can use primarily for CS101. But I think these span across many domains, many contexts and a lot of what I have borrowed is research done in, what I will be talking about has been done in education and psychology for many decades in fact. But what's new is in science and engineering classrooms and my background is from physics so I can speak that in the physics classrooms, we have been now gathering data and doing systematic, let's say trying to understand how people learn and what strategies might help students learn better which translates or which sort of the next step is how to use those to improve teaching. So that's the context of where it's coming from and let me hear a little bit from you because the first thing, a lot of things I'll say might sound nice but we all have problems. So the first thing I'm going to ask is what are some typical problems you face in your classes? Either from your side or students side, any problems and? Maximum the student will not answer any questions. Students won't answer questions, okay, non-responsive students. Just keep going, let's hear a few non-responsive audience, any problem, I mean if you want to do a good job in the classroom and most of you are from the university systems and there? Are there a hesitate to answer the question? Okay. Hesitate to ask a question or answer. Hesitate to ask and answer questions, okay, more. It can be a personal issue also. I think maybe due to like some personal problems in students, of students, they behave differently in the classroom. Okay, students behave differently, may not be exactly the way we want them to. I guess let me try to specify my question. Suppose we want to, we're all excited, we want to do a really good job teaching, we want them to learn our subjects, we're passionate about it but that doesn't always happen. So what are some possible reasons? Yes, please. With some junior faculty, they tend to dominate a lot, like they don't allow them to teach. Like if the faculty is not highly experienced, students somehow have a firm domination on them and they don't allow, there's a very poor classroom management from that faculty. So classroom management is a problem, right? Sometime may be don't know the answer very well but they are not able to answer in a to the point or some communication problems, okay? Sometime all the students try to answer, so you get a big noise, you can't judge. Okay, fine. So what do you want to do about noise? In fact, in some of our systems, noise is good. Yeah, noise is good. So we see how to use it. Example, you ask a question, quiz. A is right, B is right, C is right. Some group will say, yeah, some group will say, yeah, like that. That's something we can address today itself and it's similar to what Dr. Sangita also mentioned earlier. Anybody else? I have a few things I thought of but I think it's good to hear from everybody. Anybody else? Sometimes they are very exam oriented as in that if you try to tell them something else, they don't have to listen to it. Exactly, exam oriented, right. If it's not coming in, that's a systemic problem we have, right? And also if you are teaching specific courses like I teach MSC also and I teach MBA and IT also. So for MBA students, they don't want to know anything technical. If you give them a case study, they'll take it but if you try to tell them architecture, they don't want. Okay, so students' backgrounds are different and they want different things, okay? In a class of 60 or more, it's sometimes very difficult to know whether how much of the content has been understood by the students. So feedback for the instructor. How do we know what students understand especially in large classes? Yeah. One answer as well, the exam tells us but ideally we want to know right away. Every day session. Okay. Sometime constraint will be there. We have classes after four o'clock or five o'clock. So we have to complete the syllabus. Yes. One sense is complete the syllabus. The actual time will be at the time. Okay. So the students will not be in position to do so. So let me just show you some of the things I thought of and there is some overlap. I think I heard a couple of new things also. Some possible problems are you have different levels of students, different interests. I think the lady from Symbiosis you said that also people learn differently. You don't know exactly how they learn. I didn't hear anybody say that students are bored and they do not. Well, non-responsiveness is probably similar to that. But it's a very common situation. The teacher is talking for an hour and students are playing games in the back or doing something. Exam-orientedness, that's my third point. And so, and a lot of other problems that some of you said. So the main question we face here and we face both as teachers and as somebody, as people who want to try to understand this problem systematically and try to do something is in spite of all these, how do we do a good job? And also why should we even bother to do a good job? So there is really no single prescription. I can't give you that. Nobody will give you that. And the, once again, the problem is varying opinions. Everybody thinks there's one good way to do things. So that's a problem. Yes. Back. I think I have met a different set of students. That is a state in all students want is good marks. Okay. Most, not all. I should not say that. That's my mistake. Because I have met some students. They are at least bothered about the marks. Accepted. Mistake accepted. Some students are many. Can I say many or some? Many. Many. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So there is no single prescription but there are some general guidelines which have come out of people studying things. And all, some are from personal experiences. But again these are from, you know, people in systematic studies as well as theories on how students learn. And the idea is that we need to take into account the population as a whole. And I like that MBA versus MSE example because there, the population as a whole has some characteristic. But at the same time individual differences matter. So somehow this, this is important and we have to take this into account. Now about things, students talking too much or dominating. One thing that people say is that as instructors we fail to set expectations. In the sense we say this is the content, this is what we need to do. But what is acceptable in the class and what is not acceptable in the class, somehow we are hesitant. We don't, we don't always say it. Again none of these is a huge generalization. But these are common things we do, especially junior faculty. So if we know that we need to set expectations early either orally in class or even written that this is acceptable in class and these rules are not allowed. Set them early and be consistent. Keep trying to enforce them and I don't mean police them but just keep repeating them what's acceptable and what's not. Including things like students are expected to be physically active in class, no sleeping but also mentally active. So I expect you to do it. So I'm setting the bar very high but from my side I will make sure that the class is engaging enough that hopefully you don't fall asleep. Then the last two things really are what I think we need to get at. Why are our students in class, what are their goals? We really need to have a good idea about that. And now I'm going away from exams. Well, exams is one thing but they are all there for reasons. And lastly what are our goals? I mean yes it's a job but something more than that. You know why are we doing, why are we in that class teaching that. So we'll try to spend time on some of these. And the reason I put, what I want to do in the next slide is just take the previous two slides and put them next to each other. These are the problems we talked about and these are some of the guidelines. And the guidelines you can see are sort of they address the problems. If we say that all students want good marks we need to ask them well what are students goals and see if we can go from that angle. Take the same problem and turn it into a question for us as to what to do next. So each one of them I try to do a one on one match. So everybody okay so far? All this sounds great in theory but how do I actually practice it? I think that's the stage we are all really at. So from now on I'll just work with examples. This is not comprehensive. These are just some strategies which have known to work. Some of them have about ten years worth of data on that these strategies are very robust and they worked in many classrooms in different subjects, different levels. So this the way you implement the clicker questions is one of them. And I'll also try to base each of these examples on some cognitive theory or some study that's been done. Okay so I'm going to show you three questions. This is from middle school mathematics. And I just want you to look at the questions. Okay so I chose this topic because I think all of us even we may be from different domains but we are very familiar with that. So this is one question. This is the second question which of the following has a slope of half. There are three lines and I'll flash the third one. Just look at it, read it for a minute. Got a chance to read them. Okay so I have two questions for you. What is similar about these three examples? The first thing that's similar. They all have to do with the same content. Okay and they're all roughly at the middle school mathematics level. Maybe I don't know 7th standard or something. 7th, 6th, 7th, 8th something like that. Next question, what are differences? Representations are very different in the three questions. One has graphical, one has numerical, one has equations. Excellent. Others. Other differences. You want to see the three questions again? Conceptually there is actually a different hierarchy, different level. So the third one seems to be a little more sophisticated or deep. You can use it either way than the first one. The first one is to practice how to use the formula for slope. And the third question is you really have to understood and you have to be able to apply it. Is anybody familiar with this thing called Bloom's taxonomy of learning? So I don't remember when this was, but in cognitive science there are these taxonomies of cognitive learning. In a sense when you learn there are different levels at which you are learning. The lowest and they are in increasing order of sophistication and the higher levels comprise the lower levels. So just to give you an example, the very first level of learning they say is knowledge, factual knowledge. What is an apple? This example is from Wikipedia by the way. The second example they say is comprehension. The third one they say is application and that's where we start coming in. How do you apply your knowledge into a new situation? Then it goes into something called analysis, where you apply it but you also have to do some, it's not a direct application but you have to do something else. And it goes on and on and the last or the higher stages go into design, synthesis, evaluation, making judgments, etc. So these questions are at different cognitive levels. Now typically a lot of our exams focus on the first kind of thing. We rarely and we do try to include a few of the others but why not? What we really want our students to do is to be able to conceptually apply things to new situations which means right from the beginning we need to start including those questions. Both in class as examples as well as on tests and homeworks and we'll come to that. So let's see what I have said. So examples one and two, there's a difference also in computational difficulty. So that's a minor thing. Difference in representation is a very important thing. One key strategy that people have studied is this idea of multiple representations. And as engineers and scientists, you open any journal. What do you see if you open a technical journal or science or something? Just open any random page. What do you see there? You see formulae. What else? Graphs, text, pictures. We see a lot of pictures actually open and even in hardcore engineering journals. So as experts we use representations a lot not just for making information convenient but as you mentioned in some representations problems are much easier to solve than in other representations. So as what we want to teach students is how to figure out the best representation to approach a problem. It starts from just giving simple questions where they have to use alternate representations but then it proceeds to trying to make a judgment on what representation is better and what's not. And example 3, it's highly conceptual and even if students have previously seen a slope they'll be interested in that question. Whereas the first question if they've seen a slope and fifth standard they'll roll their eyes and they'll say well, you know, I know how to do this. So there is a challenge and interest built into this conceptual difficulty. So let's try to do something where I'm getting at is one of the classroom techniques we do is pose a multiple choice question and have students vote on these choices and the noise issue I'll come to in a moment. Constructing these questions is what this slide is sort of getting at. The kind of questions we want to construct is not very straightforward factual knowledge kind of questions but where some thinking is involved some representations are involved and there's some extra thing going on. Let's try a question in CS 101. This is where the clickers come in but what I want to do first so what we'll do now is exactly the way we do it in class. So it's sort of a demonstration come lecture. Ideally I would have liked each one of you to have your own clicker. So since you have only one for two or three I don't want you to switch it on right now. So first we'll do the low-tech way and no talking to your neighbors right now flash the question and there'll be four or five choices. I want you to vote with your hands one, two, three, four but don't keep it up here because then everybody else will see. I want you to keep it here. One, two, three, four. That way I can see everyone but there's no copying going on and this is really effective and now there are about 25, 30 people even with about 70, 80 people I've seen people do this there is a downside we'll talk about the downside in a moment so let me flash the question. Think for I don't know how 15 seconds when I say vote I want all of you to vote. Simple for you I think hopefully. Okay vote. Do I see a lot of abstain? Actually can you keep it a little higher? Okay. So what I want you to do next is the following. I want you to talk to your neighbor convince them of your answer or be convinced of their answer. Have a discussion on a table. And when you're ready I'll have you vote. Now you can use the clickers and you can vote on the clickers. So I'll give you as much time as you want. You're allowed to change your mind. You're allowed to now talk and copy and do all those things. Go ahead. So let me set this up. Okay everybody done? So this took about I don't know 60 seconds or so and now what we will do is so you can start clicking getting your clickers on. Power them on press A and then immediately press B. Let's just look a little different. I'm just pick one of these choices. I hope your right choice is in here. Pick it and after you press A and B and get the power on click the choice in your clicker. Just store it. Ah time pause. Thank you. Okay so has everybody pressed their choice into their... Okay so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to collect the responses and what is happening now is that the receiver is coming talking to your clicker and getting your responses. Okay so now the responses have been collected successfully. So what I want to do is show you the histogram of the responses in both cases. The numbers will be different because it's about half of the earlier one. Earlier one we didn't do it electronically but I was actually noting down. So I'm just going to show you the numbers earlier. This was what roughly the distribution was earlier. I saw a lot of ones, a few twos, a fair number of threes and now let's see what the distribution is now. So this at this, so let's see what has happened now. Firstly how many of you changed your answers? Okay let's say about one third of you say you have changed your answers. It's feedback for me. The first round of voting is feedback for me that at that point if all of you have the same answer and if it's roughly the same answer I'll say okay this concept we've got it let's move on. If there was a distribution like the one I showed you on paper you know some were A, some were B, some were D etc. Then I know that okay we need a little bit of further discussion. Right now it's going very slow. Later I'll tell you the whole thing once you know how to do it it takes about four to five minutes per question. Maybe even four minutes. Okay so if I get a response like this this is a little surprising for me because it looks like half a few of us have the same answer. Oh well you want to do this again? Again okay excellent. So I'll just repeat the whole thing I'll next question is the same question. Okay so what I'm going to do is let me try to do this the first time I'm handling this software. You press A and B store your answer and then we'll collect responses. Store your answer immediately. Press A and B to wake it up. Okay no reset it first. Reset press A and then put your answer in. Everybody program their answers? Yeah. Okay so we seem to have seven plus two. I think we have ten clickers here except one all the other responses have been collected. So firstly now seven means actually 14. At least 14 if not more because you have one per two or three people actually many places one per three people. So let's say this is one is 15. What was D? D choice was none of the above. So what I'll one thing I want you to see is that many people change their answers. Many people the number of answers of one has gone up. Okay manual answer there was ten and there were a number of B's and C's also. Everybody who said B's and C's have now gone away and there are some people who say none of the above. So let's look at the choices. I'll just go close this. Look at the choices. So none of the above I'm interested or none of the above people who changed from B to A. Anybody who changed from B to A? Anybody who changed from C to A? Can you tell us why you changed from B to A? This is exactly what you want to do in class. Just very quickly. First I thought B will be correct. After discussing with the friend. So what was not right in B? Or why would B not work? There is no multiplication or syntax. So this is how we write but the program doesn't understand it. Anybody change from C to A? Anybody who had chosen all of the above earlier? Couple of people who had chosen number 5. Nobody? It's not it was in my I don't know there was some miscommunication. So things like people are changing their answers. This gives you an idea and these answers are simpler. This was a fairly straightforward example but I'll show you a little more complicated one where going through each choice actually is instructive for the entire class. Okay thanks. I think this is the only actual clicker question we'll do. I'll show you examples of others. Any questions at this point? Yes. You showed us the rest ones right? When you were doing the manual note of each choice actually I had given four. You had given four I might not have seen it. So like how do you make it practically possible? So the downside of doing a hand thing is that counting for the instructor is a little difficult. That's a big downside. If you're not very interested in the actual numbers, here I did want to show you the actual numbers to show that how it shifts and this is very typical. Each time there are some people depending on the level of the question between a quarter and three quarters of the class changes their answers and usually the answers shift to a very narrow distribution centered around the right answer. The advantage of doing it completely electronically is that you don't have to count and that's automatically recorded. So what Professor Fatuk is trying to do is to get these clickers into all the colleges and since we are developing it in-house with this great team it's still we are able to manage the cost and it's a we are able to do it. We can buy them on the market. They're available. All the corporate folks are using it. We're using it for the training programs. It's a little expensive if we buy them. I mean it is expensive, not just a little expensive. Commercially they're about two and a half thousand rupees per device. So in the US it's $30 which is again affordable by students. Here we can't afford that. So they are trying to manufacture it for a quarter of the cost. Other questions, comments? I'll show you more interesting questions in a moment. Yes, we are not electronically with show of hands. We are in Professor Fatuk's course. I'll show. Why don't I show you some of his questions? I'll come back to what this is about. Just examples. So there is a function F written there and the question is what is the return value? So when we are doing functions we flash this and show the choices. I'm not going to discuss the answers right now if we can do it later. This is a little bit about syntax but you want to talk to each other? I'll show you the next question. Just pay attention. It looks very very similar and especially in the second sentence the int F. Next question is identical almost except what happened here and what happened here. Previous question? Next question. So this is together. So I've done two changes and just if you want to point these out. These questions you don't have to do it twice. Again this is a fairly straightforward question. You don't expect too much difficulty. So you can just have everybody vote once individually. But a question like the next one and this is borrowed from Professor Fartick's course. So I'll just explain what this is. We were trying to estimate pi by calculating the area of a unit circle and we decided well unit circle is too big. You don't have to computationally do the whole thing. It will take too much time. So let's do one fourth. It's symmetric. So this code here is to calculate the area of one fourth of the area of the circle. I don't know if it's the entire code or the snippet of the code. So Professor Fartick's spend of I don't know some 10 minutes going over this code in class etc. And the idea of what the next question is about the declaration of the variables. So i, j and n. So i counter and j counter are those dots at the coordinates of each point. i goes along the x-axis, j goes along the y-axis. They have been declared to be integers. n I think is the total yeah, total number of points. Because in the end you are dividing by n square. So the question he posed and this was written by him. I kind of like this question very much. The question is can everybody read it? I'm sorry I had to type it small. He says we have declared our variables i, j and n as integers. What is the effect of this declaration on the estimation of pi? Effect isn't in the error really because it's still an estimation of pi. How close will we get to pi? Will there be a large effect because we declared it as integer? So will it well, will it be a negligible effect? Will it be a large effect and large effect due to reason b or due to reason c? And maybe, so the thing is I'm a little embarrassed to say this. I've forgotten the answer to this. And since you're all more experts in this, anybody wants to take a crack at what's happening here? It's a non-trivial question. That's what I sat in this class and students were really split. I'll tell you the results. Students were split between b and c and there were some a's. Anybody has a comment about this question? No effect? Everybody? Okay, fine. I'll just move on. You can talk to Professor Fatik if you have other. I somehow remember something differently. Why don't you talk about this when he comes back? So this was a fairly non-trivial question. So these are the kind of questions we write are very conceptual, usually not much calculation involved. Not much numbers involved. Fairly challenging. We give same questions on the tests also, a few questions like this so students know that we are being serious about it. And the actual learning is happening in the period which the instructors usually don't like in the noise period. When you're convincing your neighbor, when you change your answer or when you're trying to defend your answer, your learning principles of scientific argumentation, you're trying to do evidence-based reasoning and usually that period when you talk to your neighbor that we limited between one and two minutes and we want the group to arrive at a group consensus. So that's where the actual learning is happening. So the real study is to is it that they simply change their answer or did they actually learn something? So they'll pose a question, they'll collect all this data, then they'll pose an isomorphic question and see if people answered incorrectly the first time how many of them did correctly in the isomorphic question. And the numbers went up drastically. So if you just do question one and question two which is similar but not the same, the numbers of correct versus incorrect was the same. Concussion and then question two, different question. Then the number of correct answers in question two shot up. Fairly robust method in the sense the learning gains have been shown to be quite high. Other advantages, I'll just scroll back a little bit. One of the names is pure instruction because you're learning from your peers. It works, students are actively engaged, nobody is falling asleep, it's a game. If students' egos are involved it's great because now they can convince in a place like IIT it's very common. Everybody thinks they know the best, the students. So they really want to convince their neighbor. Students learn from each other. So this idea of learning from each other and learning as a social process again has deep roots. And you talk, actually all of us I think will agree when you say, if I ask you a question the answer is hidden somewhere there. When did you learn some subject the best? When you teach it, right? It's such a common answer that a lot of us give. That's exactly what we're trying to simulate in class. And the thing is because the questions are a little challenging but in the same domain even people who have done this before are interested. So you're targeting different levels simultaneously. So this problem of varying levels gets addressed to a small extent. This was in physics it was pioneered by professor Eric Mazur of Harvard where he realized that students were doing really well in mathematical questions with circuits and Kirchhoff's laws. But they did horribly in questions like this. So he said well something's wrong, we need to do something. And I think in 1997 9798 was when he did it. And now it's caught on quite a lot. So physics, chemistry, bio, math, earth sciences I know references. It's catching on in engineering also. Excuse me. I have done similar quiz in my class. Actually what it did was the students were grouped into teams and every group will have average and best students. So whenever we I used to display the quiz in PPTs and the answer will be on the next slide. So they will have a discussion among themselves and they have to come up with the answer in a time period, limited period. But the problem is the discussion will be only with the best students among the best students. They will not be able to share it with the poor students because they will tend to come up with the right answer always. So later on I will have to explain it after every slide. I will be explaining the answer again, the reason behind that particular answer and so I don't know whether the learning is really happening among the students. If it is through the quiz, within a limited period. Let me address a couple of points here. So she is actually formally grouping them and this is again done and recommended and typically we recommend that the groups be heterogeneous. You don't want all the high students together so what you do is what is usually recommended. Now how do you get, there are two problems with this. One is that the so-called good students dominate and second is that the people who usually stay back just never participate. So there are some ways to make this happen. If you have if you have access to a TA or you yourself can go around sort of encouraging people to speak that's one thing that's possible. Second thing is we have, we rotate roles in a group. So what is done is one person is supposed to be the debater, one is supposed to be the note taker and the third one is the arbiter or the judge. Something like that. So each person in a group, by the way groups of three or four is usually recommended. So each person is assigned a role and then we rotate roles every class. So everybody has a defined role. So today only this person is allowed to speak. More or the other person is allowed to speak. That's one way of doing it. This happens in the, what I have seen from personal experience is that this happens in the beginning usually that the groups are not functioning very well. But if they achieve a level of trust among themselves, it say by the fourth or fifth week it starts becoming better. That's my personal experience. But you have to sort of kick them. The weak students will not be able to express their answer because they feel that they lose, their group team may lose points. By the way, a very important thing I forgot to say. These are best done if you don't have marks associated with it. Do it ungraded. If you want to use it for a quiz do it separately. But don't have them discuss this whole discussion business and voting business. It's ungraded. So the pressure is off. It's not for us to evaluate how good the students are. It's for them to learn from each other. It was not added to the grade sheet and all but just for fun it's to give marks for all the teams. So what we do is that we give marks for people if they answer something regardless of what it is. So it's a way for us to take attendance. So we are being a little sneaky there. If they don't answer, they lose points. But if they answer anything, it doesn't matter what choice they do, they get points for that. So let's say we, typically we do two, one to three per one hour class. Sometimes only one if it's a conceptually hard one. Sometimes two or three. So it's good to collect feedback right in the beginning. So the first question Professor Fartep did is how many of you have seen a computer before? This was a class of 850. You'd be surprised there were 20 people who had not touched a computer in IIT first lecture. Then the next question is how many of you have done anything beyond email and web browsing? How many of you have done programming? How many of you have done C++ programming? So all these data we have now, right on day one. So it really helps us design the following classes. So if it looks like 80% of the class has written some program, I can move ahead faster. We also have a database at the back end of it which tracks individual students. We don't use it for any bad purposes, but if a student is doing poorly on quiz after quiz after quiz, we target them, give them extra help. Somebody is doing well, really well quiz after quiz after quiz. We haven't implemented that yet, but the idea is that we sort of pull them apart extra things for them. So if you want to try to address this issue of different levels, it's possible. You'll see a lot of examples and videos of it being done and also how to write questions at this website. So this is called the Carl Weiman CW, Carl Weiman Science Education Institute. Carl Weiman was the 2004 Nobel Prize winner in physics. He did atomic physics, but after that he used his Nobel Prize money to set up science education institutes and now he's doing full time science education research. They've put up a lot of information resources which you can and it's all downloadable for free. And there's something called a clicker guide. It's a 30 page handout. I found it really useful when I try to prepare these questions. We need your help. So along with your syllabi and test questions, we are preparing a library of questions for CS101. So if you've either written some of these questions, especially you said you've done it, right? Or if you've tested some of these out, somebody else might have written it and you've tested them out. Give us feedback. So eventually we want this huge library of what questions are there, which are good questions, which work, which don't, etc. Questions? Concerns? Yes. Can you suggest some mechanism or techniques where a teacher didn't have any PowerPoint presentation? If you do it on the board, you mean? Yes. And similarly, no teaching assistants. So only the person have it in a class. How many students? 80. So I was teaching a class of about 30. That was the only difference, but I had nobody with me and it was all chalk and blackboard. What I used to do is photocopy these questions. I used to do two things. Sometimes I used to come to class early, write the question and the choices on a corner of the blackboard and cover it with something, like a screen or something. And then when we actually had to do the question, I used to pull up and flash them the question, if that's possible. If even that's not possible as to photocopy these quizzes on paper, and actually not even the whole piece of paper on half or a quarter of it, small ones, and hand it just before we do it. So they read it and they do it. I was teaching assistants there because see the thing is you don't have to do it every class. In fact, you probably should not do it. You don't overdo anything. But doing one per class in Phatuxer's class, we are doing about two or so per class, and that really anchors the whole class. And for us, we know that that's the key idea we want to get at. So the most important thing you want to really get students to learn, write a question based on it. Forget about collecting data on how many students and all. This is more for them to think about it and talk to each other. Sometimes I would assign it as homework, ungraded homework, and the first thing, the following class ask somebody to talk about it. So they know where, instead of saying in last class we did blah, blah, and blah, we say okay, last class there was this question. What are the answers? So that was one option. Other questions? So let's see. Some more strategies and going back to our first problems and guidelines. This is a little provocative statement, really. The reason I say our job is not to teach is really because what we want to do is have students learn. That's a real, real job. And one of the first things we need to know is we need to know what students know, what prior knowledge they come up with. So what's written here the second sentence? It's very hard to learn something that we almost already do not know. It's a very well established cognitive and philosophical principle. That in order to learn something you need to know almost everything associated with it. Which also means you learn incrementally what you know prior to effects very deeply what comes next. This is in introductory science and maths classrooms this comes every day teachers face this. They're called misconceptions like I push an object and Newton's laws you know which was written in the 1600s say that the object should keep moving forever. Most students will say no they stop because that's what happens in real life. You push an object it doesn't keep going it stops. But the theory says it should keep going forever. So even if you keep saying this is the theory this is the theory the moment you write the moment you have to answer a real question back to that prior knowledge that it should stop and they get into difficulty. So how do you get across what we have to know is that we can't simply erase their previous knowledge. And now there is some MRI neuroscience research that says that you can't erase neuron connections which is what neuroscientists define as learning. All you can do is build new connections and hope to make it stronger. So prior knowledge and the other useful techniques. So this we are doing in another computer science networking class. Learning by analogy is a very effective tool. We do it in daily practice we also do it formally as engineers and scientists when we are doing research. A lot of things are done by analogy and this very famous example is the atomic model of central nucleus and the electrons was inspired by the solar system. There are many examples you will find. So this is a very useful technique. I'll give you I haven't put it on this I'll give you a website. There is we have a faculty member here called Professor Shridhar Ayer and he's written a series of stories for children in this journal in a magazine called Jantar Mantar we heard of Jantar and they're all about networking principles routing and IP and protocols and all but they're all with stories that there was a princess she's in a trap in a tower really beautiful articles and so you can look at those for examples how analogy is used those are for children we're doing it now in an empty class we're not using princesses and devils because it's not appropriate for mtext but we're using CEOs and secretaries same analogy next principle is that people learn differently we've talked about this so this is sort of the hardest one that people learn differently we need to be aware of this there's no unique answer what's the best way to teach but one thing that's not the best way to teach is how we learned and all of us here are really special why would an ordinary person study years of computer science and then also want to teach that so the way we learn is a poor guide to how people learn and practically that most of us teach the way we learned so just be aware of this that's a big step ahead of course we need to really give students what they want which means we need to talk to them in their language set a context it sort of goes back to the first point that we need to know what they know but what is it that excites students if it's some so here in IIT Bombay you heard about the satellite project the other day or some there's also some people building race cars but whatever excites them and there's a generational gap I agree but something that's relevant to them if you can connect to what you're doing in some computer science courses it's very very possible CS101 it's programming you can take an example from any topic and write a program for that if it's very theoretical you can okay the other thing you can do is a lot of these people will be going into industry so if you're teaching software engineering for example go to industry get cases from industry what kind of projects do they build in software engineering use those instead of the textbook examples okay this final thing the one about exams is we'll talk about how to actually do it but it's you can't get away without it if you do all these great things in class but the exams are your traditional what is the spelling of apple it won't work so somewhere or the other your exams and your assessment should reflect what we value the content the skills even the attitudes we want them to think critically we have to write questions which make them think critically so another example professor dhamdeere from CS department here he's doing in his exams I just vaguely remember this so I may be slightly wrong but in his exams there are two kinds of questions both have marks one is called routine questions one he calls as thinking questions so he labels them and he says routine questions get through them in so much time we'll get marks thinking questions these are challenging and finally to pass an exam pass the exam the student has to get at least a certain level of marks in the thinking questions so there's an overall cutoff but there is also a certain cutoff a level set for the thinking questions so you can't do really well in the routine questions and do poorly on the thinking questions and pass so this is where I think there'll be many concerns from your side constraints right do you want to talk about it a little bit can you do this can you make your exams reflect in amrita probably you can right you have the freedom some freedom so if you have any even a slightest amount of control over exams it doesn't have to be the final exam it could be a quiz mid semester quiz it could be an informal pop quiz in the class but if you have the slightest amount of control put these questions on the exam it doesn't matter how many points they are worth so now we are exploiting psychology that even if something is worth 2 percent students will work for it except some IIT students who calculate and they say well it's worth only 2 percent so I won't bother to learn but usually if it's worth some percent even it's so if 2 or 5 percent is so small that your final grade distribution doesn't get affected but you're still sent this message so the exams do you have control or is it set by somebody else and you have to follow them at least here you have control ok then I'm Srinivas of SRM University I have a point here regarding this what is an internal test as well as final exams we do have very much control over the question paper since private universities have that flexibility I'll tell a small point there two types of detailed questions are there generally in many universities either we go for either a part or sometimes 5 out of 7 or 5 out of 8 what we ensure in our department is if we take the pattern of 5 out of 8 3 questions will be of problematic and 5 will be of theoretical the problem again is out of the 60 students in my class who are generally above the good level say 20 percentage they attempt that 3 out of the 8 which are problematic and again the what we say as average students again back to the old part of only 5 so this is the way I mean though the question paper is there slowly we are able to bring them up but the speed is quite very slow I think my comment here would be what is said that we really value that's what should be on the exam it's individual I'm not making a judgment here but suppose you as an instructor really values this problem solving skill put 5 problem solving questions so that everybody has to answer at least 2 then the question as well if they don't pass you know my principal will or I'll be in trouble or the college is in trouble with some accreditation that's the next problem ok how can we change the levels of the questions maybe make some of the problem solving questions easier one solution is you can have A, B and so on so one can be problem one can be problem one can be the even every question we can have solution one thing I want to emphasize conceptual questions do add small ones often we don't do it because for us these look like if you see a numerical problem or a big derivation we think that's hard but really what we want students to do is to be able to reason represent argue but we rarely I won't say never occurs to us that we have to put these ask questions like why did this happen or so fairly simple but questions which require students to give reasons do keep putting them here and there it could be part A of the bigger derivation here I have something to share actually in my courses most of the time I may not have very weak students if I'm offering an elective but I don't have below average and some average it ends up that almost everybody gets a 70% in the final exam so there is always a criticism that now you ask them what is known and all these things but if somebody else looks at the question paper it will have a lot of critical thinking how I do is that in my classroom teaching I train them to think see most of the weak students don't have the training on how to think so that is why they are not able to think so as you said we design that small small questions which are doable even by an average and then take it slowly to the level then I fail at some level but to some extent they will so the training is given sufficient and the first test which I give I give it in a way it is doable by everyone so first test is doable by everyone almost 90% of the class so that they get the confidence that yeah we can do a better paper then when I see 90% has achieved that level my second test I make it it is 80% doable so by that time what happens towards the end of the course it happens that 70% paper is done by all and average people don't do 30% but it's ok because you said that even I feel that objective is learning not teaching so even if I have made them learn by giving them 100 problems and training them people may say you didn't develop that thinking you train them but finally that much they have achieved in the learning process that that question is actually debatable how much is it these clicker questions usually people don't do very well but if you do the thing is if you do sufficient numbers of them yeah they will start doing that but then it comes back to us if my goal is that they learn this why not let it no harm in training we can train them and make them learn it's ok if everybody may not be a genius to think in the first level and second comment is this whole Gaussian distribution and all it's we all I think we all agree there that if the whole class is getting to 75% that's actually a very good thing yeah no I say you can check the paper like the quality of the paper has not gone down and if you have been able to bring then why not let it be as it is other comments ok few other strategies and some of these are really short cute little things I'll just spend a moment on the first one I mean I should not really have put it here but I put it just for my conscience especially the last one I am sure all of us agree that we need to let students we need to first care about students but the thing is we also need to let them know one way or the other that we care about their learning and their well-being and sometimes we just don't do it because we think it's assumed so I want to spend time on the first point a little bit what do I mean by chunking there's this idea it's quite called Miller in sometime in the 50s he said that the original idea is that working memory is very limited for all of us so there's long-term memory which where all the associations are built and things are strongly coupled etc which is where we pull things out when we are trying to solve problems but when we are actually doing things it's a working memory which is important now what Miller said is he came up with a number he said that there is a number which is let me remember this correctly I think 7 plus or minus 2 7 plus or minus 2 things I'll leave this word thing unspecified or what we can have in our working memory at a given time I'm going to write a number and look at it for exactly 10 seconds what was the number? now I'm going to write another number just one moment let me write it and I'm going to give you even less time this I want you to look at the number in the bottom what was the bottom number just making my point so two things have happened firstly actually this is two points I should not have clubbed the two points but firstly the bottom numbers have a context context is also cultural this is India that's why I put these numbers if I were teaching in the US I'd put something else like 171494 and stuff like that so cultural context is important but you see the other thing is I've chunked it's the same number of digits but here there are three things I have to remember here there are 12 things I have to remember so 12 is more than 7 plus or minus 2 but 3 is within that range so this is what's meant by chunking the material now as experts we're very good at that we know how to make associations between seemingly far away things putting it all together into one thing that's why we remember so many things there's another common expert novice difference experts think of a big of an area as a few connected concepts so chunked but connected concepts novices think of it as many many disconnected concepts so when we want our novices to become experts we need to train them how to chunk them how to put them together and also how to connect them so this is a common example done in psychology labs but you'll have to come up with how you can do this in your own classes I just find this a very cute little strategy body language, face the class etc is really more important I mean it's important for everybody but especially for junior faculty and we keep seeing it here we just it's just something you need to look at people when you speak not look at the board I'll really not spend time on this one okay this is more interesting to me so the last question there I had in the very first slide was what are your goals now we talked about students goals setting context and knowing what they know etc let's come to what are your goals now there's two parts to it first part is what are your goals for your students and there's this idea called learning objectives and in fact right now we have a big mhrd project which is being anchored by different IIT's and what we're doing is every course many not every many science and engineering courses we are writing what students should be able to demonstrate for every unit let's say unit is a lecture for every module which is a series of five or six lectures together so it's like a chapter maybe a lecture course these are specific performance based outcomes so I'll tell you what a learning objective is not give me tell me a topic okay pointers let's say learning objective is not be able it's not understand pointers it is not be able to appreciate quantum field theory it is not develop confidence it's not these is because how do I know if a student has appreciated quantum field theory or not it's not a demonstrable outcome so a learning objective for example could be I'm going to go back to the slope because I'm more comfortable there learning objective could be be able to calculate a slope given a graph of a straight line and given two points so now if a student has it's very clear has done this or not done this so we need to be extremely clear about our learning objectives textbooks don't have these, notes don't have these this is not a very commonly done thing not even in IITs definitely not in the university systems but the clearer we are about what exactly we want our students to be able to do and to be able to learn it's much easier to set exams setting exams is very easy once we have this learning objective document the downside is writing a learning objective document for a course firstly it's a few maybe 30-40 pages because it's excruciatingly detailed it takes a few months this big MHRE project we are working on we are writing these and then we are going to post them for did Professor Kannan talk to you about the national mission on education through ICT so this is part of it but I would encourage you to take maybe a small unit maybe just one lecture so usually one unit or one lecture has four or five learning objectives no more than half a dozen because then it gets too cumbersome could be just two but nothing about understanding or appreciating it has to be apply, design define, describe if you want there is a set of verbs that is recommended that we use for these things actually I have that if anybody wants to send me email I will send it to you I didn't put it here the next thing is when we are doing something well we have these learning objectives but we need to communicate it with our students there is some really complicated derivation this derivation will help you apply XYZ to ABC at some point students not at some point often students need to be told this and the final one is what I very firmly believe in we all want them to do good problem solving etc but we have to explicitly teach them strategies not as a theory but within an example it's not these skills are not unfortunately they are not implicitly learned and unfortunately most of us believe that if I show them how to do it they will get it there is nothing implicit about it if you want them to draw a graph or a picture to solve a problem put the first step draw a picture make them do it force them do it it's boring for them initially they'll complain but after 5 times they'll do it in the test say draw a graph then solve this problem so explicitly teach and explicitly expect them to do reasoning reasoning is the same thing let's say you have a problem which is based on a concept part A could be explain why this bulb is brighter than that bulb or B calculate the wattage of this bulb and the wattage of that bulb so when they explain they don't use numbers they actually have to use words or pictures so this is our goals for our students what they should learn many questions at this point and it comes under this general umbrella of learning objectives but I think I have a second part of our goals and it's our own personal growth, intellectual growth career advancement things like that so I'll just end with these couple of slides there is a lot of research being done apart from technical areas but also in education research but domain based so all these education research things I'm talking about today is not coming from psychology or behavioral science but from the domain experts, physicists and biologists and computer scientists there are many universities now that are doing education research that is trying to understand how students learn concepts of computer science what strategies work there's a whole thing on visualizations and animations I didn't even touch upon it but little bit it comes under multiple representations if you have access to a computer bring an animation to class where to find animations there are many open source animations available on the net, ITB is developing a big there's a big project again if you're interested we can talk about it the first one all of you are doing research in your own technical areas bring it to the classroom when the context is correct students love the new hot things and you say this is forefront research bring it to the classroom I've heard this from a lot of teachers not a lot, but from some teachers especially people who say that academia is not paying well and I'm still junior I have a lot to go so the thing is what is it that an instructor like us can learn from the classroom that is portable also to the industry so you can use and this is really not so much for you this audience here but if you have to convince your colleagues you'll have colleagues who'll say why I'm just doing this for a year, two years till I get a good job in industry so these are things you can help to convince them so these are some of the areas in science education research I had done a little bit of literature and let me stop here questions, discussions etc welcome yes please regarding the question papers what you were discussing about the implementation level questions normally since it's as a deemed university we have the freedom to set question paper and it is always the implementation level questions what we have most of the questions why just to invoke the thinking process like what you said and normally what happens is last year we were handling the computer programming paper and since they are coming soon after they are plus 2 to a new environment when the students face a question paper there is a chance to lose their confidence especially for the average and below average students however they try they are not able to answer and come up with a good grade which they were not used to in their previous 12th standard and personally I have heard from some few students that however we try we will not be able to answer the questions because in the examination hall we have to struggle with the questions because it will not happen through their preparation because it's last year question paper was too tough even the faculty members took little time to solve and come up with the answer key and all so personally I feel if it is for a first student we need to have a balance I agree with you that raise their confidence level so that in the second semester onwards maybe they will be able to cope up with such papers and grow with such standard this is very similar to the point Dr. Sangita brought up that you want to train them to get to a certain level and one more little one of those little strategies there is this idea called scaffolding in English if you are familiar with what scaffolding is if you go to a construction site you see these big bamboo poles and the ropes that's scaffolding so it's a visual metaphor for what we want what we should be doing as instructors so it's a very powerful idea in education that we need to give scaffolding when required but then we need to slowly remove the scaffolding when the building is built we remove the scaffolding so scaffolding are the intermediate steps or make the first exam easy or have a blend of easy and hard questions or in class where marks are not important have them practice these exams these questions so give scaffolding a lot in the beginning we are not there to prove how smart we are and then once you have to make a judgement once the time is right start removing the scaffolding so the scaffolding gives them the confidence I am just talking about the first semester it's too short to train them in 4 or 5 months but you can start including bits and pieces so I have made this mistake as a novice teacher I set an exam I was really thrilled with it very conceptual and my postdoc advisor she saw it and she said no you have to rewrite she just rewrote some of the questions and I said these are stupid questions they are not thinking questions and her point was this she said if you write 15 questions all of them hard and first they won't do well and they'll just hate you and they'll never think about these questions so out of 15-12 were extremely straightforward and 3 or 4 were these little challenging thinking kinds this was again first year biology students learning physics and those kind of things so yeah