Are these students who would have attended college 25 years ago?
At 4:11 PM -0600 11/18/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Perhaps times are changing and my students know different vocabulary
than mine, but I have had some laughers on the last two tests,
except it has me concerned that I may be getting so old that I am
losing touch; or the students are truly ill-prepared for life in
general. I would except students to be knowledgeable about life in
general just from reading. Maybe these students, whose *average* GPA
in high school (these are incoming freshmen in intro psych and I
have all of their admissions data) EXCEEDED 3.8 because of honors
and AP classes are getting short-changed?
I used a standard item on the learning test and asked for the
schedule of reinforcement for various behaviors. I used fly fishing
as one item. I got the most outrageous answers: the fish will learn
to fly to get fed; you can catch more flying fish; fish will go
faster if they fly than if they swim, etc. And then there were at
least a dozen students who gave simply incorrect answers without
embarassing themselves (probably didn't understand schedules of rf
anyway) and another dozen who flat out came up and asked me what
'fly fishing' is.
Ok, I let that slide. So now we have another exam, now over the
developmental chapter: M A N Y students came up to ask me the
meaning of the words "innate" and "longevity" and many more missed
an item on Head Start. We talked about Head Start in class, but I
didn't go into explaining what it is all about. I guess I'm teaching
kids whose families would never have qualified and they never heard
of it because the exam item required them to go a bit beyond what we
talked about and very many of my students couldn't because they had
no context for what they had memorized by rote. One of the foils on
the multiple choice item referred to "middle-class" and was clearly
incorrect because middle-class children wouldn't qualify for Head
Start. Many selected that foil as correct, and wrote in the margin
their explanation (I allow this on items the student wants to
challenge) and I got all kinds of answers about middle this and
middle that.
Wow, what's up with all this? I'm feeling either very very old or
exceptionally well educated in a broad way.
--
The best argument against intelligent design is that people believe in it.
* PAUL K. BRANDON [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
* Psychology Department 507-389-6217 *
* 23 Armstrong Hall Minnesota State University, Mankato *
* http://krypton.mnsu.edu/~pkbrando/ *
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