Group Studying the Final

Just under three weeks until final exams. Some of my conscientious plan-ahead students have stopped by my office to discuss if they are adequately preparing for the final exam. My course web pages in general chemistry contain an extensive “How to Learn the Material” section. It covers time management, pre-reading, post-reading, how to approach homework, how to approach exams, keeping up with the material, etc. (The conscientious students already know these things.) One thing it doesn’t do is discuss group brainstorming for the final exam.

In many countries, including where I grew up (not in the U.S.), the education system features culminating high-stakes national exams. These are designed to test the student’s knowledge base over several years’ worth of material, in all subjects, usually crammed into a week or two. Needless to say, it is extremely high stress compared to here in the U.S. Perhaps not surprisingly, one strategy we used as students was to get together and try to predict the most likely topics or types of questions we might be asked on the national exams.

I had forgotten that strategy – it’s been a long time since I’ve used it. Over the summer, when I read about the Treisman studies (in Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi), I started to ponder the effects of group-study-workshops. In short, Treisman, a math professor, followed his students around to observe where students studied, with whom (or alone), how they studied, when they studied, etc. For some groups, “Saturday night studying in the library counted as social life… in part, over studying and doing math problems together.” Essentially the academic and social lives blurred. Treisman set up workshops where students worked on challenging math problems together. Participating students, who had previously worked and struggled alone, started to improve their calculus grades significantly.

No, I haven’t set up any chemistry sessions in a similar vein. Not yet, at least. But I’ve been turning the idea over in my mind all semester long. (Really, I should get together with a group and hash out this idea!) That’s what reminded me of my group strategy long ago when approaching high stakes end-of-year exams. I did not originate the idea – this was par for the course (pun intended); students had been doing it for years and the lore was passed down.

Anyway, I started telling my students that after they’ve put in the individual work to prepare for the final exam, they should consider get together with their like-minded classmates to hash out what might be important, what might be asked on the final exam, and how to better prepare for the exam as part of a group consensus. The important caveat, I stressed, was that for it to work well, they had to have individually studied up ahead of time. If an unprepared group of students came together, there would just be hot-air speculation, unlikely to be actually useful to anyone.

In a sense, I’ve sort-of done this for the take-home midterm exams in my general chemistry class this year. After studying and taking the exam alone closed-book in the allotted time-frame, my students are encouraged to look up answers, get together with their classmates, and then annotate their exams (in a different color) before turning them in. I pitched this as good preparation for the final exam. I didn’t enforce working together in groups – I’m guessing some did and some did not. Perhaps I should ask, and then check if the responses correlate to subsequent performance on the final exam. My mind is now starting to swirl with how to design a simple self-assessment that will help me tease out the various (possible) factors. I feel like I’m becoming a social scientist! It might help me figure out how to help students set up their own ‘working groups’ that would be productive.

Getting to a Hundred

This post is not about living to a hundred years old, even though my last post was titled “Life After Fifty”. Unless medical breakthroughs significantly enhance the quality of life both physically and mentally for older folks, I’d prefer not to burden others with my eventual physical and mental decline. There are no centenarians in my family so I don’t think it’s in my genes to be long-lived. Cell evolution might even suggest pre-programmed death at a certain stage.

Today’s post is about setting goals – about my blog posts. I had no particular plan when I first started out, except that I should be regular about posting. How regular? I had a vague notion of approximately two posts per week, but didn’t put any pressure on myself if I had a particularly busy week, or if I just had nothing interesting to say. In 2015 there were 85 posts, increasing to 92 in 2016, and then dipping slightly in 2017 to 91. At the beginning of this year, I set myself the goal of getting to a hundred. This is post #93 in late November so I’m still on track.

My colleagues know that I keep a detailed time-log so that I know where my time goes. It allows me to align my use of time with my priorities. That being said, I don’t actually plan ahead how I budget my time and use it. I have a sense of what needs to be done, and I do it. This however means that things with a deadline (i.e. the urgent) get taken care of before important things that don’t have a deadline. I don’t like running up close to a deadline so I tend to get things done ahead of time. I prefer to live with as little stress in my life as possible. While I am probably more efficient running closer to a deadline (adrenaline and all), I also tend to make more mistakes if I rush something without sufficient time to double or triple-check. As an instructor, I can tell when my students have turned in reports or homework when working at-the-last-minute. It’s not a pretty sight.

Looking forward to next year, I would actually like to reduce screen time. This means I am unlikely to get to a hundred in any other year. This year is my last chance! Seeing my students glued to their mobile devices, listening to their stresses when they’re willing to talk about such things, and reading more generally about the increase in mental health and wellness issues among college students, has made me more aware of my own consumption of screen time. I’m increasingly concerned with the chronic effects of society being ‘alone together’ (to use Sherry Turkle’s phrase). Human biological evolution proceeds at a far slower pace than technological evolution – it’s no wonder the stresses have increased in our increasingly technological society.

I’d also like to take my writing to the next level – i.e., being more thoughtful and focused. Right now, my posts are a mishmash of whatever I’ve been thinking about lately – and regular readers of my blog know I have wide-varying interests! I would like to have a little less quantity in my writing and a little more quality. Maybe reduce my zombie nouns further. But that’s next year. This year, I’m still trying to get to a hundred!

Life After Fifty

Happiness as a function of age is a U-shaped curve; thus concludes Jonathan Rauch, author of The Happiness Curve, subtitled "Why Life Gets Better After 50" And that dip where you experience the least happiness? This happens in your forties, at least that’s what the average data shows. Where does this data come from? We’ll get there in a minute. First, a little motivation.

Rauch wrote the book partly because he experienced a middle-age malaise. Not a midlife crisis, mind you, but a malaise of the vague unhappy variety, not sufficiently powerful enough to act drastically and buy a red sports car (or any of the other ‘crisis’ tropes). Rauch also talked to many people who had gone through or were going through the same feeling. Mind you, this might only apply to the more well-to-do who have to some extent been ‘successful’ in the career thus far. As a journalist and writer, Rauch digs into the subject, talks to people who study such data, and weaves both data and anecdote into a brisk narrative. The Happiness Curve is an interesting read, regardless of your age or your experience with the middle years.

How does one measure happiness? There’s no easy objective measure, and so the fallback subjective self-rating survey is used. That’s not a bad thing per se, since we are interested in people’s self-perception of their happiness, and not so much whether it is grounded in an objective reality. As is standard in the quantitative social sciences, after the statistic jocks have controlled for various other factors, one still sees the U-shaped curve. The pattern holds in different countries. Here’s a snapshot from the book. (I apologize for the blurriness of my unsteady hand.)

From this subset, you can see the general conclusion that in most places the trough (the turning point ‘star’ in the graphs) is mostly in the (age) 40s. In the U.S., it’s just a little over 45, while in the U.K., it’s a little under. You’ll also notice the trough is fairly shallow once the data has been averaged (although an individual person may show larger jumps). In almost all cases, except Russia, the turning point comes well before the average death age which is in the 70s or approaching 80. This means that for most people, on average, life actually feels better after fifty. And it gets better for another 20-30 years until you die. Except in Russia where just as you might be starting to feel better, you die. On average.

The other thing to notice is the vertical scale. The U may be rather shallow, but the absolute happiness rating does differ significantly by country. Folks in the U.S. are much happier overall than in most any other country. (Not shown on this graph are the happiest countries, all located in Scandinavia for some reason, possibly having to do with hygge.) Things aren’t as good in Latin America or China, and the outlook is noticeably worse in Russia. The U.K. and Germany as representatives of Western Europe aren’t much below the U.S.

The next figure is even more interesting. In the survey, folks rated not just their current life satisfaction but also projected what they expected their life satisfaction to be five years out. The data for expected life satisfaction was then plotted with a left-shift of five years so that one can directly compare the two for a particular age.

And what do we see? Younger folks in their late teens through the 20s and 30s expect that they will feel happier five years down the road. But reality does not meet expectations. Ah, the optimism of youth! The discrepancy between and expected and current satisfaction narrows in the 40s. A growing realization that life isn’t feeling rosier and recalibration takes place (subconsciously) as life proceeds. In the early 50s current life satisfaction actually starts to rise although the five year projection doesn’t catch up for – well, another five years or so. Life after 50 feels better and gets better, but human subjects simply refuse to believe it. While the expected satisfaction curve gets flatter, it continues to trend downward. You might be feeling better at 60, but you expect you’ll feel worse at 65. Predicting the future is always difficult – in more ways than one.

The U-shaped curve isn’t limited to human subjects. Apparently our apish close cousins also show a similar experience. This data is sketchier because apes can’t take surveys to rate their happiness but there are other observations that experienced zookeepers can make. The data set is much smaller, though.

All that being said, correlation is not causation. Three big questions you might be thinking about after seeing the data: (1) Why is there a mid-age malaise? (2) Why the upturn after fifty? (3) Why the pessimism even though the data show a U? Rauch pieces together tentative answers to these questions through multiple interviews. While they have a U.S.-centric flavor, the conclusions he draws are interesting – I won’t give the game away and encourage you to read his book if you’re interested. These are not Cliff-notes.

The U shape has not been my personal experience thus far. I’m not quite fifty yet, and by average rights I should be in the trough. Turns out I’m very happy at the moment. Maybe I passed a trough some years back and didn’t notice. Or maybe I’m not the average person having lived in one country the first half of my life, and in a very different country the second half of my life. Furthermore, my sunny outlook has been increasing despite minor health-related aging issues. Rauch also addresses this. There seems to be an increasing gratefulness despite declining health among the aging population. Today, being Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., I’m feeling very thankful about many things in my life. And maybe I have something to look forward to in a few years. Life after fifty!

The Purpose of Grades

In the previous post, I discussed some broad themes with regard to summative and formative assessment. Today, let’s dig down into the weeds of why we have grades in the context of summative assessment, at least according to Daisy Christodoulou in Making Good Progress – the book I’ve been reading. I will begin by using the question and quote approach similar to the previous post.
(I recommend reading the previous post for definitions I’ll be using.)

Why are summative assessments needed?

To support large and broad inferences about how pupils will perform beyond the school and in comparison to their peers nationally.

Why are there ‘grades’?*

The purpose of grades and other similar labelling systems is to provide an easy way of communicating this shared meaning… An employer or a teacher at a further education [university or college] is able to infer from it how well the pupil as done in that subject.

Are there other assessment alternatives to letter grades?

There are other methods of communicating a shared meaning which don’t look like a grade but in practice fulfil the same function… [for example, reporting] performance in terms of labels such as ‘emerging, expected and exceeding’ [a particular standard].

If being able to communicate the shared meaning is key, what restrictions does this impose on summative assessments?

1. They need to be taken in standard conditions with strict restrictions on the type of external help that is, and that is not, available.

2. They have to include questions that allow us to distinguish between different pupils.

3. They have to sample from [a larger] body of content [because] it will not be possible to cover all of it in a test that is a couple of hours long.

While I’ve provided soundbites from Christodoulou, she does explain each of the points more fully and provides clear examples. I recommend reading her book if you find any of this interesting. With the main purpose of summative assessment is laid out, we can see why formative assessment might look different. In particular, the teacher does not need to worry about the three restrictions above in designing such activities and assessments, particularly if the purpose of formative assessment is figuring out what to do next given where the students are at a certain point. Christodoulou argues that the ‘responsive’ aspect of formative assessment is important. Feedback runs both ways from students to teacher and vice-versa.

Let’s take a closer look at exams, since this is one of the most common methods of assessment in science courses. (I certainly use it regularly.) Exams can certainly provide summative information, but can they also provide useful formative assessment? One way they might do so is via detailed question-level analysis – if the questions are sufficiently detailed, and can be broken down into discrete parts. If a student answered a question incorrectly, why did the student err? Christodoulou provides a nice example of an exam question on electrolysis with commentary from a science teacher analyzing the possible errors. While this isn’t a multiple-choice question (MCQ), I’ve seen a number of cleverly paired MCQs where the right and wrong answers in the first question are paired with suitable “I chose my answer because…” MCQ explanations. Such paired MCQs are difficult to design if you’re a novice teacher, but an experienced instructor who knows the common pitfalls can zero in on this. I sincerely hope there is a good test bank of such questions – or I should really start collecting all the examples I find now so I can use them!

One of the challenges in summative assessments where the grades function as a discriminator of student activity is that (at the college level), the exam questions are more complex and require synthesizing different conceptual knowledge and skills. These sorts of questions work well to distinguish the ‘A’ student performance from the ‘C’ student performance. However as the complexity of the question increases, the reason a student may err becomes increasingly difficult to pinpoint. We certainly want to get our students up to the point of being able to tackle these more ‘authentic’ problems, but throwing such problems at them early on is likely to be more confusing than enlightening.

It makes you wonder if grading the earlier efforts is helpful from a learning point-of-view. I use low stakes quizzes throughout the semester, but it’s mainly as a motivating factor for students to keep up with the material and do the reading and homework. It has very little impact on the final grade. In my general chemistry class this semester, I’m experimenting (again) with low-stakes take-home exams but a higher stakes final exam. I worry that this approach favors the stronger students and disadvantages the weaker students, but I don’t have enough data to conclude if this is truly the case. Christodoulou provides a suggestion I haven’t yet tried out – that formative ‘grades’ be assigned based on improvement measures. But there are caveats to this approach (which she also tackles). I’ll have to think a little more how to avoid the pitfalls should I try this. There are also other approaches to qualitative formative assessment.

Chapter 5 (“Exam Based Assessment”) of Christodoulou’s book closes with whether exams and grades provide valid summative information. We’ve discussed the challenges of reliability in such assessments in the previous post. I’ve also previously considered the aversive control of grades. There’s also the elephant-in-the-room of ‘teaching to the test’ or students employing short-term strategies at the expense of long-term learning. Gosh, teaching is complicated!

*Did you know that college grades influenced the meat-packing industry?

Validity and Reliability

I’ve been slowly working my way through Making Good Progress? The Future of Assessment for Learning by Daisy Christodoulou. It’s one of the clearest expositions of the differences between formative and summative assessment, and how teachers can improve the implementation of both forms of assessment. While the book is geared towards grade school, as a college instructor I still found it enlightening. The book makes excellent points with well-chosen examples, and is very carefully and clearly written. It draws from the work of Dylan Wiliam, who has written the equally excellent (but longer and more detailed) Embedded Formative Assessment.

Today’s post focuses on Chapter 3 of Christodoulou’s book, “Making Valid Inferences”. I will pose this as a series of questions, with quotations from the book in italics in answer to each question.

What is the key purpose of summative assessments?

[Summative] judgements have to be shared and consistent across different schools, different teachers and different pupils [students].

How does summative assessment differ from formative assessment?

The purpose of a formative assessment, by contrast, is to give teachers and pupils information that forms the basis for successful action in improving performance… [to] give them a better idea about what they should do next.

Can you use the same assessment tool for both formative and summative assessment?

It is possible… for example, when a teacher administers a paper from a previous year in order to help students prepare for an exam… evidence from the test can be used to produce a shared meaning, such as a grade, and some useful consequences, such as identifying certain areas of relative strength or weakness that a pupil needs to work on.

[But] different purposes pull assessments in different directions… for example, in a classroom discussion a pupil may display ‘a frown of puzzlement’ …[which] tells the teachers something extremely useful and allows them to adjust their teaching accordingly… however [it] is of much less value in providing a shared summative meaning. The reverse is also true. Knowing that a pupil got a grade ‘A’ on a formal test is an accurate shared meaning, but it provides a teacher with relatively little information that will change their teaching.

Why is designing such dual-purpose assessments tricky involving trade-offs?

The purpose to which an assessment is going to be put does impact on its design, which makes it harder to simplistically ‘repurpose’ assessments.

To bring home her argument, Christodoulou defines two key terms: Validity and Reliability.

In an assessment displaying high validity, we should be able to say something about the student’s knowledge in the domain being tested (assuming a standard set of learning outcomes for the same course). “Validity refers not to a test or assessment itself but to the inferences we make based on the test results.” If the student earned an ‘A’ on a standardized math test, can we infer something about the student’s effective numeracy capabilities? What would a ‘B’ or ‘C’ tell us? So, what we infer about the student’s knowledge in the assessed domain is the key point here. We can’t practically test the entire domain, particularly at more advanced levels, so the inference is typically made on a sample of the domain thus further complicating the issue. If a different set of test questions was used that sampled the domain in a roughly similar way, would the student perform similarly?

That’s where Reliability comes in. Is the measure reliable? Yes, if students taking a different version of the same exam showed similar performance. If the exam was taken at a different time in a different room, performance should be similar. If the exam was graded by someone different, the result should be similar. Practically, this is a thorny issue. The issue of different graders could be reduced by using multiple choice questions rather than open-ended ones. Making different versions of an exam that ‘test the same’ is tricky. And every individual student is different – one might be having a bad day, one might be approaching food coma just having eaten lunch, one might be affected more by noise or lighting.

What sort of error bars are we looking at when we try to measure reliability? Christodoulou provides some data (and plenty of references). I recommend reading her book to see what this looks like, but I can tell you that it’s tricky. She also usefully divides up assessments into two types – a Quality model and a Difficulty model. In the Quality model, “students perform tasks and marker judges how well they performed”. This is how one might assess a more open-minded piece of work, say an essay or an artistic performance. In the Difficulty model, “students answer a series of questions with increasing difficulty”. This is what one might see in math and science exams.

There is a further complication. The relationship between Validity and Reliability is asymmetric. A reliable assessment may show poor validity. Christodoulou provides the example of doing away with writing assignments and essays, and reducing everything you’re trying to measure to multiple-choice questions on grammar. But if you want to know whether a student can write effectively, the multiple-choice exam has poor validity even if it might show high reliability. On the other hand, a test with low reliability makes validity increasingly questionable. If the student performs significantly differently on a different day or with a different version of the same exam, what can you infer from the results? It’s highly unclear.

How does one go about designing such assessments? What do grades signify and how can we use them productively? We will tackle this and more in a subsequent post.

Battles of the Third Age

As a Tolkien fan who has read The Silmarillion multiple times, I was eagerly anticipating my (library) copy of The Fall of Gondolin. The story of Tuor and the Gondolin battle is only narrated very briefly in a short chapter of The Silmarillion, so I was looking forward to digging into the details.

In that spirit of anticipation, I pulled out a boardgame that I hadn’t played in eight years, Battles of the Third Age. I’m referring, not to the Twilight Expansion of War of the Ring, but the standalone scenarios focusing on Rohan and Gondor. I’ve only played the easier and shorter Rohan scenario, but after eight years I couldn’t remember the rules and had to relearn them.

In the Rohan scenario, the Shadow player commands the armies of Isengard, the Dunlendings and Mordor orcs. Their goal is to overrun the settlements and strongholds of Rohan before the Ents are sufficiently roused to lay waste to Isengard. The Free Peoples player marshals the defence of Rohan. In the beginning of the game, Theodred is stationed with forces at Deeping Coomb. Will he try to hold the fords of Isen against the forces of Shadow? Or will he retreat behind the dike into the Hornburg (Helm’s Deep)? One of the enjoyable aspects of these boardgames is being able to replay the tape with different strategies and outcomes. Below you can see Theodred’s army staying put as the armies of Isengard approach.

At some point the Ents show up to attack the orcs. Treebeard leads a small sortie to harry the rearguard of the Shadow forces. They succeed in destroying one army in the rear but are too late to play much of a role when the Hornburg is assailed.

The Shadow player achieves victory either by capturing a number of Rohan settlements or eliminating all key leaders of the Free Peoples armies. The Free Peoples wins if the Shadow player makes little headway when a rejuvenated king Theoden shows up midway through the game, or if Fate takes its course – the Ents are sufficiently roused to destroy Isengard before the Shadow player’s objective is achieved. The Fate Track is an innovative key feature in Battles of the Third Age. In the Rohan scenario, it is 18 “timeline steps” long. Along the way the Free Peoples can activate new characters and reinforcements. Treebeard may show up on step 3, Eomer on step 5, Aragorn on step 6, and Gandalf on Step 8. Below you can see that Aragorn is ready to enter the game to boost the leadership of the Free Peoples armies. Once Gandalf enters, he may free Theoden from Wormtongue’s influence.

If you’ve played War of the Ring, the gameplay in Battles of the Third Ageis similar. Action dice determine the types of moves each player can make. There are interesting thematic cards that each player uses to influence events during the game. There’s also plenty of dice-rolling as armies clash and troops attempt to rally. Different army units have special abilities that are activated by tactics tokens. But through it all, Fate moves along at an uncertain pace. The picture below shows a later stage of the game where the Hornburg has fallen to Shadow, but Gandalf, Eomer and Aragorn are holding a line of forces to protect Edoras and the eastern plains. A new group of Ents is attempting to disrupt the Shadow forces.

I was able to play four games over the past month. Two were Shadow victories and two were Free Peoples victories. The Fate Track is particularly interesting because how quickly it moves is determined by both a random draw and by how aggressively the Shadow player exerts leadership. Some turns the Fate tile may just move one step; other turns it might move three steps with new Ents added to the Entmoot. This variable balance, along with the cardplay, keeps the game interesting and replayable even though the objectives remain the same. Strategies adapt to the shifting winds of Fate.

This past week I finally got to enjoy reading The Fall of Gondolin. For some reason, it made me feel like watching the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogy movies again! I also hope to play the Gondor scenario (siege of Minas Tirith) sometime.

Managed Chemistry

There are many riddles to unravel in studying the origins of life. One recent major change in the literature is the use of the plural ‘origins’ rather than the singular ‘origin’. Several years ago, a major journal in the field changed the first word in its name by pluralizing the singular. It is now Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, to account for multiple origin hypotheses.

One long-standing argument that divided the field for a time was whether genes came first or metabolism came first. Over the last decade there has been a détente in the two camps realizing that they both genetics and metabolism likely co-evolved, however the details are still poorly understood. The latest foray into bridging the camps is an article in Foundations of Science by John Stewart titled “The Origins of Life: The Managed-Metabolism Hypothesis”.

The crux of the argument is that a proto-metabolism by itself is highly unlikely to evolve into a more complex life-like system because of a ‘cooperative barrier’. Two key contributions to this barrier are (1) the inability to support ‘beneficial cooperators’ (molecules that catalyze the formation of other molecules within the autocatalytic proto-metabolism) that themselves are not produced within the system, and (2) ‘free rider’ molecules that reduce the concentrations of molecules participating in the metabolism, which essentially behave as parasites.

How could one imagine taking the next leap of complexity? Stewart’s answer is that the evolution of ‘managed chemistry’ is required. In particular, he argues that a separate digital-encoded system, that is to a large extent independent of the proto-metabolism but benefits from it and can direct resources, would be able to drive a phase-change so-to-speak of non-life to life-like. How exactly this works isn’t clear. It is a hypothesis paper after all. From my reading (and I might not have fully understood the details), it attempts to graft the RNA World approach on to an early proto-metabolism that then allows for co-evolution. The theory takes inspiration from organizational features of living systems including societies and corporations. I previously theorized tongue-in-cheek about the role of managers as reducers of thermodynamic complexity. Stewart hints at this line of thought – ‘chemical system managers’ allows for more efficient energy dissipation thus driving the co-evolution of the system.

The article attempts to posit analogies between chemical managers and corporate (presumably human) managers in society. For example, one might consider government as an organizing system that evolved from a loose association of tribes and individuals who pool their resources to increase their energy efficiency. Specialization takes place and, before you know it, we’re no longer disparate small groups of hunter-gatherers but urban dwellers compressed into a small space – a buzzing hive of activity. If you were to estimate the energy use per capita in an urban area, the efficiency is likely higher than in the rural areas despite the idyllic picture of living-out-there in nature. Remember we’re talking about efficient energy use as a total sum and being able to direct ‘excess’ energy into other products and activities. Cities are good at that, despite their problems.

Stewart makes some suggestions of how his hypothesis can be tested, and how it differs from other seemingly related hypotheses that he thinks have their flaws. He’s not very specific about how one should go about this, so I’m not sure who might take this up. But it’s an interesting idea nevertheless. It has also made me think about management in a slightly different way. Now when I think about administrators and managers, I’m going to start imagine them as molecules in a system! Hmmm… I wonder what molecules will represent them. Might depend on their different personalities and idiosyncracies, and whether they are foxes or hedgehogs. I just talked about some properties of polar versus non-polar molecules today in my general chemistry course. Maybe some managers are like polar molecules and others are like non-polar molecules. Perhaps I’ll have strange dreams tonight about them.

Seven-Day Timelog

InsideHigherEd had an article earlier this week titled “Counting the Hours”. The writer chronicles lessons learned from keeping a seven-day log to find out where her time goes. For a number of years, I’ve asked my first-year students who are also my academic advisees to do the same. In the current iteration, the students complete the task sometime in the month of October. I started doing this because I’ve found it personally valuable – I started tracking my time my first year as a tenure-track professor so I know where my time goes.

Students stop by my office individually to tell me what they’ve learned from keeping a seven-day timelog. I don’t ask to see it, although sometimes students voluntarily show me the details because they want to explain a particular observation. I simply want to know (1) what jumped out at them, (2) if they’re happy with the way they’re spending their time, and (3) if there are any changes they think they should make about how time is spent. I don’t provide any tips or strategies unless the student asks for advice about a specific issue. Often the students come to a realization of what they’d like to change and start working on it even before they come by my office to chat with me.

It’s been neat to hear what students learned about themselves and where their time goes. Some of them decide to keep doing it because they found it useful. I usually share the story of how I decided to just keep track of my time the first month on the job, and then I did the second month, and then kept going, and now I have years of interesting data. Even if they don’t continue the practice, practically every single person has told me that it was a valuable exercise.

Exercise is one of the things that most of my current students have been good at keeping up. The college is located in a part of the country where people seem to care about these things and there’s an internal culture to keep fit. One of my students decided she’d like to push herself a bit more and picked out a triathlon she’d like to train for. (She used to do these in high school, but hadn’t been training with that regiment and realized she missed it.) Another student actually thought she was spending too much time on exercise. Most of my students are doing decently on sleep at this point, although some of them pointed out that they were lacking and needed to do something about it. They’ve usually started putting plans into action – maybe because they know I’ll ask them about it. I suppose that’s one good thing about having at least a tiny amount of accountability.

Eating was another thing that came up. A number of students didn’t realize how much time they spent at dinner socializing with friends. By and large, this was not a bad thing –the students realize that it’s important to take breaks and that socializing over a meal is a good thing! One student realized that eating lunch while doing homework was less productive at least for her. Another student realized that he needs to wake up a little earlier so he can have a proper breakfast and that helps him concentrate better in his classes the rest of the morning.

A few students were surprised at how easily distracted they were by their cellphones while trying to do homework or study – and that it took much longer to get through their work because it was constantly being interrupted. They actually took immediate steps (closing or moving apps, turning off the phone) to remedy this without my making any suggestions, so that was cool. One musical student was surprised how much time he spent on his keyboard (which he enjoys, and is a good outlet). Several years ago, I had one student who was surprised at how much time she spent in the shower. Students sometimes note the disproportionate amount of time spent on different classes. Perhaps not surprisingly, my chemistry class had the most outside-of-class work time-wise for many, if not most of them.

Hopefully the lessons learned in October are taken to heart in November! I’m glad my students find the exercise valuable and I expect to keep having it in years to come. Here’s the slide I showed my students when introducing the exercise. (From a Google Images search. Not sure who made the original pic.)