47 ways to exhibit and document knowledge and understanding

Last fall, I taught an Honors College colloquium course. Rather than utilizing a final exam to assess their learning, I assigned a final project designed to serve the same purpose. As you'll understand in a bit, I did not define exactly what they were to do for the final project, at least not in terms of structure or format.

I wanted the students to be free to demonstrate their knowledge using whatever approach they chose. I also wanted then to "think outside the box." To force this a bit, I asked the students to form small groups and create a list of all of the possible ways they could imagine which could be used to exhibit and document knowledge and understanding. Each group then reported back to the class, with a member of each group writing their list on a white board. Shown in these two pictures are the 47 ideas they thought of.

I was impressed (and sometimes humored and curious) by the breadth and depth of the lists the students collectively generated. After we reviewed the lists, I gave them the final project specifications, which were:

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Final project

Your final project is to be a tangible artifact that records your responses to the course’s essential questions, as it relates to your chosen major(s) and/or minor(s). This will be submitted in two draft iterations, with a third final submission. A brief in-class presentation is also expected.

Our essential questions are:

• How has the widespread use of computing technology changed the way we work, play, and interact with other people? How will it continue to do so?
• What social and legal issues have arisen due to the widespread use of computing technology? What new issues are likely to arise in the future?
• How well are people able to accurately predict the future? What affects their accuracy?

Iteration 1 of your final project is intended to be a description of how you will be satisfying the final project as described above. 

Iteration 2 of your final project is intended to be a substantial subset of what you expect your final submission of your project to be.

Your final submission and brief in-class presentation are intended to be your best work, and should address the final project, as described above.

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Additionally, in our course management system, I provided further instructions for each submission.

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Final project details

Iteration 1 of your final project is intended to be a description of how you will be satisfying the final project as previously described.

• Provide as much detail as possible.
• Explain how your choice(s) will address the requirements.
• Describe what you expect to have complete for iteration 2, and what will be added for the final submission.
• Describe what your brief in-class presentation will be.

Here is the list the class developed when I asked "How can knowledge and understanding be exhibited and documented?" You may select ideas from this list, or add your own new ideas. [I then provided the above pictures.] 

Iteration 2 of your final project is intended to demonstrate that you have made significant progress towards satisfying the final project as previously described. In Iteration 1, you described what you expected to have complete for Iteration 2. Thus, I'll expect to see that which you committed to, or an explanation of why you were not able to complete it, or why you have chosen a different direction.

Your final submission is intended to be your final product, and should include anything that is feasible to capture in electronic form, including your in-class presentation materials or notes. If your project creates a physical object(s), and you have no other digital version of it, one option is to include a digital picture of the object(s). A brief in-class presentation is also expected. 

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I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing the variety of final projects the fifteen students submitted. The submissions included the following:

• Modified version of the game of Life
• Graphical images of posters on two walls
• Modified version of the game of Monopoly
• Description of the day in the life of a pharmacist today and in 2048
• 12-sided "ball" with each panel describing something, yet connected to the next panel
• Short story
• Illustrated children's book
• Timeline of significant medical events, with current and future patient care plans
• Cartoon
• Automated forecasting model, using Excel©
• Series of blog posts
• Series of podcasts
• Extended essay
• Paper and 3D-printed dental model (jaw with teeth)
• Website

As you can see some of the students used one of the 47 ideas they generated in class, while others came up with even more ideas. I could have simply required every student to write a paper and do a presentation. By allowing each student to determine how they wanted to exhibit and document their learning, the class and I were exposed to a wonderful variety of presentations. I also believe most of the students took more ownership of their project than they likely would have of a paper. So, what did I learn from this experience? Actually, it was more of an affirmation: Give your students a choice, and they will usually pleasantly surprise you.

How would you have exhibited and documented your knowledge if you'd been assigned this final project? How creative would you have been? Leave your response in the comments below.

Am I in the right major?

Last fall, a student from my CS 222: Advanced Programming course sent me an email expressing concern about them choosing computer science as their major. The email said:

I just had a question concerning life outside of college. This first project that we just completed: is that what real work will be like in the real world? With 20+ hours of research for a small part of code? I’m just starting to question if I’m in the right major considering I couldn’t get this first project to work.

The student appeared to feel like they were “drowning,” and not accomplishing what they needed to be doing for the course. This was causing them to doubt their choice of major, wondering if they were really going to enjoy it in the future.

I’ve written some about the CS 222 course before. (What we learned—Fall 2017, and Spring 2018, and Popular achievements—Spring 2018 and Spring 2019.) The course, by design, tends to “throw the students in the pool, and encourage them to (learn how to) swim, while I stand by the side with a reach pole in case someone starts to drown.” This does not mean that I don’t provide instruction and scaffolding, but one of the objectives of the course is for the students to learning how to learn, something computer scientists are going to have to do their entire profession. As such, the course is structured such that the students have to find much of the details and skills themselves as the semester progresses.

So, how did I respond to the student? Here’s my response.

Fair question. Mostly, the answer is a resounding no.

As you become more experienced, there is less you will need to research. If you don’t recall how to do something you’ve done before, you’re likely to understand the overall idea, and just need to be reminded of the details. If you’re needing to do something new, it’s not likely to take you as long to find a solution because your past experience will lead you to an answer quicker, or often provide some of the background knowledge you need to understand the new task.

When you first learned how to tie your shoes, you likely struggled greatly, and had to keep going back to Mom or Dad for reminders. At some point you were able to reliably do it on your own—if you really concentrated. Days/weeks/months(?) later you got so experienced with tying your shoes you could do it without even thinking about what you were doing.

But then there was likely something else you needed to learn, and the process started again. Life is about continuing to learn. Stop learning, and you stagnate.

Am I suggesting you’ll never struggle getting code to work, and end up spending 10-20-30 hours trying to figure out why? No. Inevitably that will happen on occasion. I believe it will happen less and less as you become more experienced, however.

Hang in there. If you enjoy challenges, problem solving, and coding, I believe you’ll do well. If you want to talk more some time, let me know. I’m always glad to do so.

Did I provide the right response to this student? Would you have responded differently? Leave me a comment below and let me know what you think.

By the way, the student finished the course with an A, continued with the computer science major, and landed a very successful internship this summer. When I contacted the student for permission to include their quote, they also replied with the following:

With my internship experience now I have had to research things to be able to complete a program, but I have found that it doesn't take up as much of my time as I thought it would. I thoroughly enjoy the position I am at now and found that your response was very true in relation to this internship. I am very glad that I reached out to you and received your response in the fall, without it I may have changed majors.

Sometimes you have more of an impact on others than you realize at the time.

Student quotes are included with permission.
Image credits:
Doubting girl: https://publicdomainvectors.org
Boy tying shoe: http://www.clker.com

Breaking up discussions: My 2019 redesign of CS 239

Although I’ve taught CS 239 (Social and Professional Issues) many previous semesters, I have not been assigned to teach it for a few semesters. Spring 2019 changed that, so I took the opportunity to revisit the learning environment I provided for the course.

This course is a one credit hour course which meets once per week for 50 minutes. Historically, I led lectures and discussions for a third to half of the weeks. I assigned the remainder of the weeks to groups of three to five students to research and present their assigned topic. Usually the group presentations consisted of lecturing, despite my encouragement to do something different.

This semester, I wanted to focus on getting the students engaged in the material. I decided to not utilize group presentations or lecturing. I focused on discussions, but also felt that keeping students engaged in fifty minutes of class discussion was a bit of a stretch. I wanted them to dig into the material and explore its importance and applicability to them as future computer scientists. With a bit of thought, I developed a plan to break each week’s fifty-minute class into a series of short discussions which focused on the week’s material in different ways.

Prior to class each week, I expected students to read an assigned chapter or topical material and find a recently published article related to it. (I called this assignment “In the News.”) Each 50-minute class session roughly followed this schedule:

1. Announcements/reminders/questions (5 minutes)
2. Chapter/topic quiz via clickers (10 minutes)
3. Review/impression of the chapter/topic (18 minutes total)
1. Assemble groups of 4 people (6 minutes)
1. Agree on exactly 4 words (single words and/or a phrase) to describe the chapter
2. Groups report their words (5 minutes)
3. Groups choose one word/phrase from the accumulated list (2 minutes)
4. Groups report back (2 minutes)
5. Discuss common themes of (selected) words/phrases (3 minutes)
4. In the News discussion (17 minutes total)
1. Assemble new four-person groups (7 minutes)
1. Very briefly discuss each person’s ItN article
2. Select the most interesting or important article
3. Prepare a 60 second (non-tech supported) presentation which includes:
1. Topic and very brief description
2. Why interesting or important?
3. How related to the course material?
4. Which word/phrase from above list does it relate to?
2. Individual 60-second group presentations (10 minutes)

Thus, my objective each week was not to lecture, or directly discuss the content of the reading, but to have them engage with the material, first individually, then in small groups, and finally the full class. They first read the assigned material outside of class, and critically thought about the content as they selected a related article for the In the News assignment. Then in class, we had a short quiz, which was easy to pass if you’d done the reading, but a bit more challenging, if not. The quiz was intended to encourage coming to class prepared. If more than a few students missed a given question, we’d briefly discuss it before moving on to the next one.

After the quiz, the class split up into four-person groups to briefly discuss their understanding of the material, ultimately agreeing on exactly four words (individual words, a phrase of four words, or some other combination) which they felt represented the material. Each group reported their words, and I wrote them on the white board. After all groups had reported, I asked the groups to reconvene again, and select the one word or phrase from the accumulated list they felt best represented the material. We then briefly discussed their observations about what was, and was not, chosen.

I then asked them to form new four-person groups, where each person would very quickly summarize their selected In the News article. The group then had to decide whose article was the most interesting or most important for others to hear about. Someone (usually the student whose article was selected) from each group then reported details about the article in a one-minute presentation to the full class. (See above for the expected details.) Time permitting, we’d then have another brief discussion about their observations of the selected articles.

This format led to good—and sometimes very lively—discussion each week. The students were aware our time was limited, and thus tended to keep the discussion moving forward, rather than dwelling on one particular point. Overall, my perception of the semester was good. Most students appeared to be engaged, and willing to participate, at least in the small group discussions, if not the full class discussions. Many students were also willing to respectfully voice differing opinions, and to listen to other’s thoughts.

Rather than a final exam, the students had to write reflective responses to a few prompts. One of the prompts included (in part) the following request.

Write an essay describing, specifically, how you learned one of the items in the Top N list we created in class during our final exam time. Be specific about the context of learning: the place, the time, the people, and the process.

The class of 33 students submitted a variety of responses, some of them average. However, many responses stood out to me, and helped validate that the course had met my objective of getting students engaged with the material. I provide examples of these responses here, with the author’s permission.

Student 1:

“I have found that everyone DOES have their own ethical standards; however, it is important to adhere to the ethical standards of the field and company as well. I learned this pretty early on while going through chapter 9 about the ethics and responsibilities of professionals.; however, the ITN articles I went through really solidified the meaning for me.”

Student 2:

“In most of our discussions, if someone offered a dissenting opinion, it was often presented as an alternative way of thinking, rather than as a retort or any sort of rude negation of the presented thought. It was nice to see that a group of random students with different views were able to have respectful discourse about a variety of topics, many of which students had opposing views on.”

“This was a good opportunity to see in a real environment how even those with inherently opposing views could come to a solid and satisfactory conclusion from a “debate”, while maintaining a high level of respect for one another through the entire process. It was fitting that in a class about the professional world, we put into practice the item from the list in real life, rather than just learning about it from the text or through assignments.”

Student 3:

“This situation of disagreeing with someone’s opinion most commonly occurred on the two diversity days of class. Although the situation for me was frustrating because I felt like I couldn’t respond how I usually would outside of a classroom environment, I do think that these days were the more productive days of class because they seemed to generate the most class discussions due to the differing opinions. It was useful to be in this situation in a more professional environment because usually I am in an unprofessional environment.”

“In a professional environment, both parties are held to professional standards, whereas, in an unprofessional environment one person can be respectful, but the other person may not because of the lack of a professional environment. … The combination of these professional experiences in class and unprofessional experiences out of class helped show the differences of the same situation when people are held to professional standards or when they are not. Those differences helped cement the idea that you can have a professional conversation with two differing opinions as long as you adhere to the standards of a professional environment by being respectful.”

Student 4:

“The most prominent thing I learned was that everyone has their own ethical standards. The one moment that comes to mind that taught me this the most was early in the semester in the discussion of privacy. All four of us in the group had different opinions on what constitutes a breach of privacy. As I thought more about it later, I realized that none of us were necessarily wrong, but we just had different standards to one another. I also realized some time later that this is another argument for diversity as well, because it can help make a product that the most users will be comfortable with.”

Student 5:

“I thought everyone knew. That being said, I was proven wrong multiple times by my classmates who didn’t seem to really “get” certain concepts, like the importance of diversity or what is actually ethically sound. I sometimes found myself frustrated and wondering if I should even state my perspective because they weren’t going to “get” my point. It wasn’t until I decided that my perspective deserves to be heard just as much as the other guys that I would participate in class discussion. When I did, I remember commenting on why I didn’t agree with someone, and after I spoke someone else commented that they felt similarly to me. This gave me more confidence in my opinions, not because I knew I shared them with another classmate, but because the conversation kept going. We continued to share ideas. We didn’t stop talking just because we didn’t agree. I am often scared in conversations that if I voice my opinion either I or the person I am speaking to will let their emotions get the better of them and the conversation ends at that. With mutual respect and an open mind, even those who don’t always agree can work productively together.”

I am anxious to teach this course again using the same pedagogy to see if I get the same results. It could simply be that I had an unusual bunch of students this semester that were willing to discuss and listen to each other, and that another group of students may not do as well. I’m hoping that is not the case, as I really liked how the class worked out this time.
What are your thoughts and experiences? Please share them below in the comments.

(Edited on 07/09/2019 to add student 5's quote.)