Who Cares About Student Feedback?

Some professors don't. They make the argument that students aren't qualified to judge a teachers ability. They might be right, but for good or ill I care about student feedback; I want to know what my students think about my class. One thing to consider is the way in which I receive feedback, well ways really. I get feedback through five main channels: RateMyProfessor, unsolicited student messages, solicited student surveys, our official student survey (IDEA), and direct feedback from a boss.

As of August 28th, 2012

1. RateMyProfessor - This website has become pretty famous among students as a way to suss out the quality of higher-ed professors. I imagine only students who feel strongly one way or the other will post comments here, so the data might be a bit biased. That said I'm doing ok on their 5 point scale. Most students like it that I tell stories, so I'll keep that up. I have the creepiest picture imaginable on the website which I think is responsible for my lack of hot peppers.



An example of a positive tweet



2. Unsolicited Student Messages - I'm referring mainly to social media messages. Since many students are my friends on Facebook and twitter I see when they write about me. During these first few weeks of the semester there seems to be a lot of positive feedback, which is great in that it makes me excited to be here too. My goal is for students to find each other on twitter so that they can commiserate about class and support themselves through the more difficult chapters.
   

   

   Solicited Student Survey Free Responses



3. Solicited Student Surveys - At the end of each section of my class (there are five sections) I ask my students to complete an online survey to give me some feedback on how they feel about their learning in my class. I really want all my students to have a good learning experience and since I am regularly trying new and different activities, assessments and assignments I want to make sure that these changes are having the effect I intend. It might be a bit of a hassle for students to do this again and again but it really is the most valuable to me, since it is direct and immediate feedback about specific things we have just done in class.


4. IDEA Survey - This is the colleges official student feedback form. All students receive this for all classes via email toward the end of the semester. We started using this last year and student response rates were too low for meaningful statistics to be done. Hopefully this year we (faculty) can all encourage our students to complete these surveys so we can do some useful analysis. I really want this to be valuable because it can compare how students rate me against other psychology professors or against the college as a whole. I mean it is great that my students seem to like me, but what I want to see is if they feel they are learning in my class and learning at least as much as students in other classes. 


5. Direct Feedback From a Boss - This last one only happens on rare occasions. Sometimes a student is so upset that they will go to a program coordinator, department chair, or division dean to complain. Whenever this has happened with me I have been impressed with how sensible my dean, chair or coordinator has handled the situation. But should I change my style because of a vocal student complaint? Even if I'm still getting good reviews from so many others? I weigh this carefully. I don't want any student to get this upset in my class. I'm ok if students get uncomfortable (that's part of learning), but I don't want it to be more than they can bare. So I always try to weigh the pedagogical advantage that I give to the majority of my students against the displeasure of the few... Is there another way I can achieve this that will be less objectionable? Is there a way I can soften this information in consideration of student sensitivities? Could I tell this story with less profanity? The answer is sometimes yes. 

The short story is I care what students think. I won't always change my teaching or behavior because of your feedback, but I do carefully consider it. So please continue to inform me about your thoughts, feelings, and opinions on my teaching, and I'll continue to try to be a better teacher.

The Science Behind Todd Akin's Gaffe

Recently Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) made a very bad gaffe. It is pretty serious and you might have already heard about it. The quote in question as made during an interview with KTVI on Sunday was:

“If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down."

Now a lot of people have been very upset about the phrasing of "legitimate rape" and rightfully so (you can already buy "illegitimate rapist" T-shirts). But that's not what I want to write about. I want to talk about the myths regarding pregnancy and rape. There actually is science that has been done specifically on this problem, and as it turns out the opposite is true. Researchers have found that the "per-incident rape-pregnancy rates exceed per-incident consensual pregnancy rates by a sizable margin." (Gottschall & Gottschall, 2003).

The Gottschalls set out to re-evaluate the data gathered by medical and public health professionals regarding the medical and psychological health of rape victims. By carefully screening this data the researchers were able to come up with meaningful comparisons between consensual (albeit unprotected) sex pregnancy rates and rape-pregnancy rates. After adjusting for contraception use the per-incident rate of pregnancy resultant from rape is about 8%. This is compared to the consensual, unprotected intercourse was calculated at 3.1% (Wilcox et al., 2001). But how can we explain that?


One possible explanation is that women, somehow, broadcast their fertility. That is to say that men can tell when women are ovulating, and that this is arousing, and thus triggers the rapist to strike. While there is evidence that men can detect when women are ovulating, I still don't think that fits well here. In general rape is considered a crime of violence not passion. It is about dominance not reproduction. But even still there may be some link between increased arousal and violence in men. A better supported explanation is that of coitus-induced ovulation. This is like what happens in cats; a significant vaginal stimulation triggers ovulation. In fact the very stress of being raped may trigger ovulation. Researchers were able to show that acute stress can trigger ovulation at any point of the menstrual cycle (Tarin et al., 2010).

Certainly more research is to be done on these and other potential mechanisms of this phenomenon. Even still I think it is important for politicians (and all of us) to use the science that is available to us. There is research that we can use to help inform public policy and I feel it is dangerous for us to ignore science.I don't know what this means for Todd Akin (I'm not a political science professor) but hopefully he'll read some science for next time.

Jonathan A. Gottschall, & Tiffani A. Gottschall (2003). Are per-incident rape-pregnancy rates higher than per-incident consensual pregnancy rates? Human Nature, 14 (1), 1-20 DOI: 10.1007/s12110-003-1014-0 
Tarín JJ, Hamatani T, & Cano A (2010). Acute stress may induce ovulation in women. Reproductive biology and endocrinology : RB&E, 8 PMID: 20504303 Wilcox AJ, Dunson DB, Weinberg CR, Trussell 
J, & Baird DD (2001). Likelihood of conception with a single act of intercourse: providing benchmark rates for assessment of post-coital contraceptives. Contraception, 63 (4), 211-5 PMID: 11376648

Researching Diviner's Sage

As I mentioned before I worked in a rat lab, and over the next few weeks I'd like to write a bit about some of the research I did as a graduate student at UMSL. I spent my time depressing rats and treating some of  them with novel plant-derived compounds (some poor rats just got depressed and given placebo). Before I can tell you more about my project I'd like to share with you some of the work that influenced me.

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants ." -- Isaac Newton

One of the first sources of inspiration for me was an article I read in Wired about research done by Catherine Willmore (et al.) back in 2007. She was researching a relative of Sage from the Lamiaccae family, Salvia divinorum, AKA Diviner's Sage, AKA Mexican Mint. The plant produces hallucinatory effects in humans and thus has been used by religious and recreational consumers. But since salvinorin A (the main active extract derived from the plant) is selective to kappa-opioid receptors, and is one of the few non-alkaloidal hallucinogens, it has potential to influence the development of a new class of pharmacological drugs and is thus interesting to study. Also because many states lack laws regarding sale and use of Salvia it has grown in popularity amongst the youth. (Don't do drugs)

The researchers used a drug discrimination paradigm in rats to verify that salvinorin A does in fact target kappa-opioid receptors as a primary mode of action. This was my first exposure to this (apparently well-accepted and robust) paradigm. The researchers began by conditioning rats to press a lever when exposed to an established synthetic kappa-opioid agonist (U-69593 obtained from Sigma-Aldrich right here in St. Louis). To do this, they limited the rats' diet, and then put them into a response box with two levers, on days when they got U-69593 they were rewarded with food after pushing the lever on the right, and on days when they got a saline injection they were rewarded when pushing the left lever. Thus once the rats were sufficiently trained on lever pushing then they were assumed to be able to discriminate between a kappa-opioid agonist and control injections. At that point the trained rats were given salvinorin A instead of U-69593 and they still pushed the correct (right) lever, indicating a similar subjective pharmacological experience between U-69593 and salvinorin A. But it is possible the rats had associated "different from saline" with pushing the right lever. So next the researchers injected the rats with nor-BNI (a kappa-opioid antagonist) which will prevent kappa-opioid agonists from having an effect. After treatment with nor-BNI the rats were given a dose of salvinorin A and placed in the response box.  This time the rats pushed the left lever indicating an effect similar to saline.

So I think this falls under the heading of talking to the animals. Not in the Doctor Doolittle sense, but this paradigm asked rats, "Does this drug (salvinorin A), make you feel the same as this other drug (U-69593)?" and the rats kindly answered, "Yes. Yes it does."

Cool paradigm not withstanding, the results of the experiment largely confirm (in an animal model) information that we already suspected. This is the research that introduced me to Salvia and after some digging I found that there hadn't been a whole lot of science done on this mysterious plant. So that gave me an opportunity to ask some new research questions of my own.

Willmore-Fordham CB, Krall DM, McCurdy CR, & Kinder DH (2007). The hallucinogen derived from Salvia divinorum, salvinorin A, has kappa-opioid agonist discriminative stimulus effects in rats. Neuropharmacology, 53 (4), 481-6 PMID: 17681558

About Me: Preparing to Teach

During the interstitial time between semesters I always think back to my first semester teaching. Every semester we teachers prepare for our classes; we usually just call it prep. Prep can be a verb ("I'm going to prep my course sometime in the non-specific future when I will allegedly have more time to work on it.") or it can be a noun ("My prep for 101 hasn't changed in 30 years and if I don't notice any problems then it must be working fine."), but either way it refers to all the work we teachers do before the first day of class. It always feels as though there will be time to get this done, but it also always seems to devolve into laying tracks before an oncoming train. The first time I had to do prep was daunting; I had no idea what I should prepare. 

I did the same thing  a lot of new faculty do --  I read the text book, downloaded the powerpoints supplied by the publisher, and perused the Instructors Resource Manual (IRM). The IRM was a binder that had been given to me that had a HUGE amount of instructions about how to run lectures, what sort of activities one could do and a bunch of other junk delightful materials that teachers could use like worksheets and crossword puzzles. I thought I was well prepped for day one. I was wrong.

A PowerPoint Wall of Text

The publishers powerpoints, while detailed, are essentially the same information that is in the text. So, I found myself reading them and then saying, "Any Questions?" to a classroom of bored students. So by the second week I had cut most of the text out of the powerpoint, but then what should I do with my time in class? Activities. But, crosswords didn't work for me; my students sat quietly looking up answers in their books and trading them amongst themselves. Same thing with any "work sheets" but what did I expect? That is high school style. So I went to work transforming those work sheets into real interactive learning experiences. It wasn't too hard to reshape them into a discussion followed by a writing exercise where students generated answers that used material from the textbook instead of regurgitating vocabulary terms.


Then I went nuts. I made a disturbing amount of assignments, rubrics, and activities. I tweaked and re-tweaked my syllabus. Ultimately deciding to run an experimental classroom where I did things way differently than I had before. Each semester from then until now I've had experimental elements in my class trying to find out exactly what works for me, to achieve the classroom that I want. Never once though have I felt "prepared" by the time the semester starts. I always feel there is more I could do ahead of time if only I had more time.

Which brings us to now. After this summer I think I have it locked down. I'm not adding anything new this fall. This is the first time that everything I'm doing is something I've done before. This semester will be the semester of refinement. Without doing anything new I will be able to tweak, adjust, and weave my course into a fine afghan of teaching (or liberty blanket of learning I suppose).

For those of you that are interested here is my syllabus complete with a list of assignments my students will likely do this semester (Fall 2012). I, of course, reserve the right to alter this at my own capricious whimsy. Oh I guess that is one new thing I'm doing this semester; I put my syllabus on my Google Drive as a Google Doc.