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Thread: Is technical education getting too...technical?

  1. #121
    Quote Originally Posted by Loki View Post
    How this is relevant to what anyone else said in this thread is beyond me. Please stop responding to yourself and start responding to the people you quote.
    Quote Originally Posted by Loki View Post
    I've said it here before that I think everyone should get at least a 2-year college education.
    Quote Originally Posted by Loki View Post
    Is the goal to increase the value of a piece of paper or to actually produce informed and productive citizens?
    Anything else you care to distort?

  2. #122
    And you talk about providing nutrition to 5-year-olds. I know it might be hard to believe, but the thought processes of most people here are not like your own. So if you expect anyone to have any idea at all what you're trying to say, you should take that into account.
    Hope is the denial of reality

  3. #123
    Quote Originally Posted by GGT View Post
    Instead of "everyone" having a two year college degree, maybe we should start education early (before age five) and extend HS a bit longer. Whether that means no summers off for K-12, or taking 14 full years to complete....it seems clear that we're trying to cram too much information into kids' heads, in too short a time. It's not as simple as the 3R's anymore. World History and geo-political changes of the 20th century alone are chock-full of important things to learn. And math has expanded so fast that even elementary kids are doing Algebra I was learning in JHS and HS [what my parents used to call "new math", when they couldn't help with my homework--decades ago :eek]

    The first five years are the building blocks, though. I wouldn't mind seeing mandatory pre-school and kindergarten, and/or having Day Care facilities operate more like early-learning schools instead of the babysitting facilities that are predominant now (in the US).
    In Florida you can start florida certified education as young as 6 weeks old, via head start and VPK programs. I wouldn't mind seeing a true yearround school year, but those in control of budgets would flip their shit (not to mention people having to let go of the idea of summer vacation).

    Its been known for a while that younger children are more receptive of complex ideas, like algebra, at much earlier years than the current school system introduces them into it. Something about allowing them to absorb the concepts before they get set in their ways (how many younger children understand math can include letters?) My sister went through an Algebra focused class at 3rd grade as a sort of trial and the classes exceeded all expectations from what we were lead to believe. The problem is that the children lose interest in middle school because they they already know the concepts being taught.

    Which is why Loki has been asked several times for evidence about his claim that younger minds can not comprehend complex ideas or critical thinking skills. Ness and Veldan where even doing a pretty good job of keeping this thread at the top with their well spaced fluff replies; but you went and gave him something to try and distract the conversation with.
    "In a field where an overlooked bug could cost millions, you want people who will speak their minds, even if they’re sometimes obnoxious about it."

  4. #124
    Quote Originally Posted by Loki View Post
    And you talk about providing nutrition to 5-year-olds. I know it might be hard to believe, but the thought processes of most people here are not like your own. So if you expect anyone to have any idea at all what you're trying to say, you should take that into account.
    I was talking about the importance of early childhood education, when weighed against your suggestion of "everyone getting a two-year college degree".

    Kids in pre-school have to come prepared to learn, and not being hungry is part of that. That's the rationale behind subsidized breakfasts and lunches in public schools, but it's also the nutritional science behind toddlers having snack-and-milk time every couple of hours. It's part of their "curriculum" and it makes perfect sense. Just like "quiet time" (or matt time, nap time, whatever you prefer to call it). It's age-appropriate education.

    You were the one who brought up complex thought processes by young people, and I'm the one suggesting that's not the main goal of Early Education.

    You're the one who mentioned producing informed and productive citizens, and I'm the one saying that begins within the first five years of life. IMO, it makes more sense to begin early, very early...and include ALL things related to human brain development. Health, nutrition, and social interactions, especially. Your opinion seems to be expecting all kids to get a two year degree. In fact, that's exactly what you said.

    See, that's me responding directly to what you've said. And disagreeing with what you've said. Care to explain the basis for your opinion---that everyone should get at least a two-year education---or why that's better than giving every student a very Early Education?

  5. #125
    Quote Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer View Post
    [snip]
    Its been known for a while that younger children are more receptive of complex ideas, like algebra, at much earlier years than the current school system introduces them into it. Something about allowing them to absorb the concepts before they get set in their ways (how many younger children understand math can include letters?) My sister went through an Algebra focused class at 3rd grade as a sort of trial and the classes exceeded all expectations from what we were lead to believe. The problem is that the children lose interest in middle school because they they already know the concepts being taught.
    Kids are sponges, that much is true. Toddlers can "learn" three languages at once, before they even talk. But that's not the argument Loki is making. Not as far as I can tell. He is placing more importance in the latter years of education, while ignoring the importance of early education.

    Which is why Loki has been asked several times for evidence about his claim that younger minds can not comprehend complex ideas or critical thinking skills. Ness and Veldan where even doing a pretty good job of keeping this thread at the top with their well spaced fluff replies; but you went and gave him something to try and distract the conversation with.
    Ness and Veldan can have their own debate with Loki. That doesn't excuse Loki from addressing my view about the goals of early education, in contrast to his view of "everyone getting a two-year degree" in their latter years. That's not a distraction of conversation. That goes to the very core of the conversation.

  6. #126
    I don't think Loki ever actually actively disputed the importance of early education or feeding children, which makes your aggressive challenges summat difficult to understand.
    "One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."

  7. #127
    Well. I've obviously been away a bit and don't want to wade into the morass of argument here, but I'm pretty passionate about this subject, so I'll toss in a few comments on the OP:

    I think there are two separate issues at stake here. The first is whether people studying non-technical subjects can or should be taught a foundation in technical subjects in a manner that is more readily accessible to them (i.e. 'less technical', though I consider that a bit of an oxymoron). The second is whether curricula should be changed for people actually studying STEM fields to reduce the rate of dropouts/switched majors.

    For the former question, I think there's a clear value in having our general populace have a basic understanding of math and science. For most people, this probably means an understanding of AP-level/intro college level of the three main sciences and a course in applied statistics. (Calculus, while a very useful tool for scientists and engineers, probably is not necessary for the broad population, though I'd strongly encourage anyone with an interest to take it, of course.) AFAIK there are many such courses available in universities - there are plenty of 'math for non-majors' courses out there, and at least at my uni there were dumbed-down versions of intro science courses for non-majors. I obviously didn't take any of these - all of my intro science coursework started at the 200-level and above - but my understanding is that they are not particularly challenging from a technical/non-technical perspective. Obviously if you take out most of the analysis and math, you end up with a lot of memorization, but perhaps there's some value in non-STEM students in having a basic scientific vocabulary.

    We can debate back and forth about the best time to do this education (high school or intro uni), but fundamentally the option exists and is at least taken by some students. The way most core curricula work in humanities, though, is that they only need to take a bare minimum of science courses, and non-majors tend to gravitate towards such useful topics as Intro to Astronomy and Intro to Geology, which likely have much less real-world application. Perhaps there's some room for improvement there, but I doubt it has to do with how technical these intro courses are.

    Onto the second question, of whether we can tweak the curricula or courses for STEM majors to reduce the dropout rate. I think the answer is a qualified yes. On the one hand, the high dropout rate has a lot to do with student aptitude and preparation. STEM subjects are not easy, nor are they supposed to be easy. There's a reason that they pay the highest of any college degree by a large margin, and why they have such low unemployment. The field requires a high level of technical knowledge and skill that can't be fudged, and if students can't hack the (fairly straightforward) introductory courses, they probably aren't suited for a career in the field at any rate. I can attest to this from personal experience: at my time as an undergrad in a well-respected research university (that didn't accept idiots in any field, let alone those entering the engineering school), I was employed at a university-run tutoring program for first and second year engineering students who wanted extra help with problem sets and studying. As you can imagine, we generally ended up tutoring the students who were really struggling with basic math and engineering courses (basic science courses were generally easier, even at the 200-level, and didn't have as many comers). Rarely were the students stupid, and they may have done quite well at math and science in high school, but some of them clearly couldn't cut it. They just weren't able to grasp complex analytical processes without significant hand-holding. That being said, many of these students managed to grit their teeth and tough it out (albeit taking 2-3 times as long on their work/studying); in fact, most of the population of students we saw were those who were failing but were determined to succeed. Plenty of others didn't even bother coming for help and just switched majors. So part of it has to do with student aptitude and preparation. Improving secondary school science and math curricula will undoubtedly help this, but not completely; some people just aren't intended to be engineers or scientists, and that's fine.

    On the other hand, there's a lot that can be done to keep the interest of those people who can make it but choose not to for any number of reasons. Some programs do this better than others, but the basic approach is to make the information being taught relevant and interesting. I've seen this work by far the best for engineering coursework; basic science and math tends to be pretty dry, still. In engineering, more and more programs have specialized coursework for freshmen that introduce them into the basic analytical/design concepts of engineering without being 'dumb' or non-technical. Freshmen design courses are much more common (my uni had one since the late 90s); this is in addition to ABET-accreditation required senior 'capstone' design courses. Often there is a basic introduction to engineering concepts - courses in static and dynamical systems, differential equations, linear algebra, programming, etc. - that are all couched in real-world examples and a heavy emphasis on design projects and problem solving. Since engineering courses are already slanted that way, it's not hard to 'upgrade' them to be a bit more exciting and hands-on, though occasionally this can backfire.

    Math is traditionally incredibly dry, but I had a great experience in uni. In fact, I never took a single course in the Math department; instead I took all of my courses from the engineering school through their applied math department, which dealt with an entirely different class of problem (and instructor). These classes were much harder than a traditional math course (for me, it was an honors-only course with only about 20-30 students per year), but also much more engaging and interesting. The problems were much more 'real', and the lectures involved applications of actual use to engineers. Because I liked it so much, I took extra applied math classes just for the hell of it; given the execrable state of calculus courses taught by my uni's math department, I suspect I would have had a very different reaction had I taken those. So, the topics aren't any less technical or easy, but they are more engaging.

    Science is tougher - there's a lot of basic vocabulary and knowledge you need before you can get to the really exciting stuff, but I imagine there's ways to improve on the current format. Getting rid of useless 'traditional' labs in favor of research projects would probably help a lot, but there's probably limits to how much you can do. I imagine that some innovation in education would really help here.

    At the end of the day, I suspect that the biggest reason why we don't produce as many engineers and scientists as we would like is that pre-uni preparation is awful, and some of our brightest people go for ridiculously lucrative careers in jobs that don't require as much skull sweat without even considering STEM fields. That being said, making uni curricula more accessible to students - NOT less technical, but more interesting - may help hold the attention of some people who might otherwise switch to a career in finance or law.

    One last thing I want to emphasize is that being a scientist or engineer is a lot more than just having certain knowledge sets or skills. They each involve a way of thinking, a culture that is not really taught at all until university, and then only through osmosis. It's possible that the reason people leave STEM majors early on is that they simply don't mesh with the culture. Maybe they don't have an instinctive intellectual curiosity about the natural world, or maybe they don't automatically look at something and try to figure out how it works - or could be made better. That's fine, and maybe it's reasonable that those people don't stay in the field. Perhaps if we tried to have this culture permeate through STEM coursework in K-12, it would better prepare students for the radically different way of thinking in technical fields in uni.

  8. #128
    I finally got around to reading your piece, and while I didn't find anything I seriously disagreed with, I wanted you to know your thoughts were appreciated.

    Our department (and esp. the lab I work in) are doing a lot of work on improving the first year courses in physics, part of it being more realistic (as in shit some physicist actually deals with) problems rather than complex systems of pulleys, wires and individual charges scattered around in pathological patterns. It doesn't really surprise me but I find it endearing that some people who study and teach physics also study the teaching of physics. Which is then used to better teach physics. To get more people studying physics. I don't know what it is like in other fields such as the humanities, but I did get the feeling as a young student that things like math were taught the way they were because they have been for a long time. I still enjoyed it, but I'm not sure if it's a much-shared opinion. Your example would suggest not.
    In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
    The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

  9. #129
    A separate issue you bring up is training in teaching or at least a bare minimum of pedagogical tools. I assume Europe works like the US; professors receive zero training in teaching, same as TAs and the like. This is slightly better in humanities, since teaching ability at least is evaluated for giving positions, but in STEM fields it's all about your research credentials and they barely give lip service to teaching ability.

    There are some professors who actually care and try to improve their courses based on new educational paradigms and the like, but they're generally few and far between. Technically most universities I know provide slight rewards for professors with better student evaluations, but it's generally nowhere near as much as the incentives they receive to publish or get grants. I don't think it's really wrong that this is how it works out (research universities don't really exist to provide interesting introductory undergraduate coursework), but it does perhaps help explain some of this. Hiring more purpose-specific lecturers or changing incentive structures might help address this issue.

  10. #130
    That's actually one of the things our faculty is working on, improving both pedagogical skills and course-born demands of teachers in the first year classes. I don't receive training on paper for being a TA but it is implicitly assumed (plus gentlemen's agreement, we're weird in the Nordic nations) that I do my best to work with the teaching team and improve what I do as well as help improve the whole. It sounds like a bunch of communist hog-wash, but the students seem to like it? Maybe it's the whole Communist Finland thing.
    In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
    The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

  11. #131
    Most research universities in the US claim they're doing this as well, but the results vary significantly across faculty members. Ditto for TAing - people don't really like doing it for the most part, but they'll make a decent efforts. It still doesn't have anywhere near the same efficacy as someone who's actually trained to educate people.

  12. #132
    Senior Member Draco's Avatar
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    I'm not following the topic, but thought that this video was worth posting: http://www.ted.com/talks/annmarie_th..._circuits.html
    In a zippy demo at TED U, AnnMarie Thomas shows how two different kinds of homemade play dough can be used to demonstrate electrical properties -- by lighting up LEDs, spinning motors, and turning little kids into circuit designers.
    It's pretty neat
    The present state of the world is not the proof of philosophy's impotence, but the proof of philosophy's power. It is philosophy that has brought men to this state-it is only philosophy that can lead them out.
    -Ayn Rand

  13. #133
    Quote Originally Posted by Aimless View Post
    I don't think Loki ever actually actively disputed the importance of early education or feeding children, which makes your aggressive challenges summat difficult to understand.
    I recalled him questioning the "value" of public funding for school breakfasts/lunches, Day Care subsidies for working-poor parents, or Head Start programs. If that's incorrect, Loki, then please accept my apologies. The fact remains that there is a vocal and influential group of politicians/voters that dispute the importance of early education and feeding children.

    Quote Originally Posted by wiggin View Post
    ....

    At the end of the day, I suspect that the biggest reason why we don't produce as many engineers and scientists as we would like is that pre-uni preparation is awful, and some of our brightest people go for ridiculously lucrative careers in jobs that don't require as much skull sweat without even considering STEM fields. That being said, making uni curricula more accessible to students - NOT less technical, but more interesting - may help hold the attention of some people who might otherwise switch to a career in finance or law.

    One last thing I want to emphasize is that being a scientist or engineer is a lot more than just having certain knowledge sets or skills. They each involve a way of thinking, a culture that is not really taught at all until university, and then only through osmosis. It's possible that the reason people leave STEM majors early on is that they simply don't mesh with the culture. Maybe they don't have an instinctive intellectual curiosity about the natural world, or maybe they don't automatically look at something and try to figure out how it works - or could be made better. That's fine, and maybe it's reasonable that those people don't stay in the field. Perhaps if we tried to have this culture permeate through STEM coursework in K-12, it would better prepare students for the radically different way of thinking in technical fields in uni.


    I wonder how much of that culture is being undermined by the way we've mixed sports with academia?

  14. #134
    How is that relevant to this thread about teaching science in college? At all? That goes for the sports part as well.
    Hope is the denial of reality

  15. #135
    wiggin referred to a culture of STEM "geekiness" that isn't taught at all until university level. (And then only through osmosis.) All students approach trade school, community college, or university education with whatever K-12 foundation comes behind them. Maybe the US culture that's known to mix athletics with academics isn't the best foundation? Don't we all know some physically talented but academically dumb jocks that got a full scholarship ride to college, having been "scouted" in HS and recruited to Top Ten schools?

    Of course we do.

    Don't we all know how most major state universities rely upon their Athletic Departments (especially football or basketball) to attract money to fund their academics? Building huge stadiums, bringing alumni "home" or attracting sports fans in general, and using that money to help pay for Academics?

    Of course we do.

    Our top schools aren't "known" for their Athletics Departments. Neither are European universities. Yet, the US has so many universities that are mostly known for their Top Ten or Pack Ten or NCAA associations. Even music majors think it's better to get into a university with a marching band, whose half-time football performance is covered by all networks....

  16. #136
    I wasn't actually talking about geekiness.

  17. #137
    I'm fairly sure that a vast majority of student athletes don't major in engineering or the hard sciences, so once again, I fail to see your point.
    Hope is the denial of reality

  18. #138
    HOWEVERZ, perhaps we need fewer student athletes.

  19. #139
    One of the blogs I try to follow had this late-comer comment on the matter:

    Not All Attrition Is Bad

    Category: AcademiaEducationIn the NewsPhysicsScience
    Posted on: November 28, 2011 10:50 AM, by Chad Orzel
    One of the many things I wish I had had time to blog about during the just-completed term was the big New York Times article on attrition in science majors. This generated enough commentary at the time that people are probably sick of it, but I haven't seen anything that exactly matches my take, so I'll belatedly throw this out there.

    The big point of the article is that lots of students who enter college planning to major in Science, Technology, Engineering or Math (the "STEM" fields, in an awkward but now inescapable acronym) end up graduating with degrees in something else:

    But, it turns out, middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion. The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls "the math-science death march." Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.
    Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.
    This sounds like the sort of thing that I ought to be all over, as I'm on record saying repeatedly that everybody can do science. I'm weirdly ambivalent about this, though, because as someone who sees a lot of first-year college students who think they want to major in a STEM field, I'm not sure that all that attrition is a Bad Thing. Some of it, particularly on the pre-med side, is probably a Good Thing, moving out people who really shouldn't be in those majors in the first place. Not because they aren't "smart enough" to do it-- many of them will go on to be very successful in other fields-- but because they don't have any idea what they're signing up for.

    I see a lot of this because we spend a lot of time teaching introductory physics to first-year engineering majors, many of whom are coming in as engineering majors because they know that engineers make a lot of money, and either they or their parents (or some linear superposition of the two) believe it would be a good career path. The problem is, that's often the only thing they know about engineering. They don't have the foggiest idea what engineers actually do, just that they get paid well, and it involves math.

    A lot of those students get driven out early in the curriculum because those intro classes are their first exposure to what real science and engineering involves, and they turn out not to like it. The mental processes involved in science and engineering are things that any human is capable of doing, but it takes a certain personality type to enjoy doing them. If you're not the type of person who enjoys playing around with things to see how they work (as opposed to always following step-by-step instructions), or figuring out ways to make graphs and charts comparing odd things in a quantitative way, you're probably not going to enjoy being a scientist or an engineer.

    And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Everyone is capable of doing and even casually enjoying activities that they would absolutely hate to do professionally. I really enjoy reading fiction and history, but I would be absolutely terrible as a scholar in the humanities, because I don't have the right personality type to do the sort of thing that they do in those disciplines. I have very little patience for raising questions without answering them, which makes many of my interactions with my colleagues on the other side of campus very frustrating for everyone. I'm happy to roll with it for the occasional convention panel or faculty colloquium, but I could never do that for a living.

    I suspect that similar processes are at work in the really high pre-med attrition rate-- a huge number of students come into college thinking that they're going to be doctors, because they and their parents know that doctors make a lot of money. They don't find out until they get to college just how obsessive you need to be to succeed in the pre-med track, and as a result, they switch to something else. Which is definitely not a bad thing, because you really do want your eventual doctor to pay attention to details.

    I suspect that there's probably a similar level of attrition for would-be lawyers, but it's harder to track as lots of different majors can serve as a starting point for law school. It's not as critical to keep track of the pre-law contingent, so it's a bit harder to identify those students who entered college with a vague idea of becoming a highly paid lawyer, but dropped that once they learned how much writing is involved. (See also this post about grades and legal careers, but this is getting off track.)

    So, attrition in science and engineering majors is not in an of itself a Bad Thing. It's absolutely true that everybody can do science, but that doesn't mean everybody should do it for a living. It's perfectly fine to have students sort themselves into whatever fields are best suited to their personality-- that's part of what college is for in modern American society, after all-- regardless of what sounded like a good idea in their high school guidance counselor's office.

    Of course, there's an important caveat, here: the sorting by personality is fine provided it's done on a rational basis. If we're driving out people who aren't temperamentally suited to being professional scientists and engineers, that's probably a good thing on balance, but if we're driving out people who have the right personality type to be good scientists and engineers because the intro classes are boring and useless, that's a bad thing. This is the idea driving the various reform curricula in physics, and ideas about active learning, peer instruction, and the rest. Badly done traditional lectures will drive away some people who would be really good scientists, but who have a low tolerance for pointless drudgery.

    The Times piece doesn't really make it clear to what extent the problem really is with the presentation of the introductory material, as opposed to the unrealistic expectations of students. This sort of thing is damnably difficult to sort out, and is probably better measured by attitudinal surveys (CLASS, MPEX, VASS, and so on) than enrollment statistics, student grades, or anecdotal interviews with education reporters.
    Which I rather liked.
    In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
    The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

  20. #140
    Makes a lot of sense.
    Hope is the denial of reality

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