Experimenting on Students

No this does not mean I hook them up to electrodes, though I want to at times. I’d certainly like to be able to read their minds, but that’s another blog. I am talking about using new or different techniques as part of my teaching arsenal. I do this all the time. I am always changing weekly team projects and large Lab assignments, usually in small ways every semester. It seems like I write the perfect set of instructions with the perfect Grading Rubric and students somehow find a flaw. Every little typo is my personal nemesis. Duh!

Nope. I am discussing grand experiments in social engineering. That the way I view the use of teams in an online class. Despite the fact that I have been using team projects for several years, I still think of it as experimental. I guess I view it that way because I don’t seem to be able to reproduce the results every time. It seem like I can do exactly the same thing from one team to the next and get wildly differing results. As a scientist, I don’t think my hypothesis is consistently verifiable. I sometimes discover that a team doesn’t work at all; a total dud. This happens maybe 10 percent of the time. About 75 percent of the time my results are very positive. The rest are at least semi-successful.

There are several reasons why teams fail. I have diagnosed one insidious problem. It has a fancy name (social loafing, or some such) but I call it ESS; Excess Slacker Syndrome.

If you have one slacker on a team of five students and the rest are good, hard-workers, the chances are great that the slacker will be elevated to a new level of performance by the rest. This is wonderful!

But, I am talking about a team where the majority of the students are slackers. These are not students who are lost. I have checked the log-ins for these students and they really don’t log in for ten days or two weeks at a time. They drop in to class for a quick ten minute session every couple of weeks, whether they need it or not. (Where are the cattle prods when you need them?) A team composed of these students is doomed. I have my version of electroshock therapy. I post dire warnings titled “Wake Up!” and advise them about the points they are missing. I email each student individually. Sometimes the patient responds. Occasionally I see a glimmer of consciousness. A frail posting showing a little bit of research. There is life there!

But all too often, the flicker of sentience fades and the team dies. I have often thought I should find these students’ addresses, get in my car and drive to their homes. A knock on the door at midnight and an angry professor holding a red pen in a threatening posture above a grade book; would that terrify them into a behavior modification? I wonder.

To be fair, there is nothing I can do about most of these students. But, it saddens me that perhaps one of them would have benefitted by being in a great team environment. If I can detect the will to live in an individual student on a poorly performing team soon enough, I can transplant him or her. Unfortunately I am only able to discern these things clearly after a few weeks of class and by that time it is usually too late. I have tried mid-semester transplants and they have not worked well. I sometimes get an mail of gratitude from a struggling student but then it is followed by weeks of silence. Seldom does it really work.

That’s why I still consider the use of teams in an online class to be experimental. Of course, I do these things in my face to face classes as well and see similar issues. But I think the “social ties” in a face to face class are stronger. It’s hard to face your peers and embarrass them in front of class because you have not done your preparation. Most of the time these students simply don't show up. The social pressure is not as strong in an online class. It’s easy to just not log on for awhile and ignore the situation.

I am still searching for a good solution to this problem. If only I could tell which students were going to be slackers at the beginning of the semester, then I could assign all the indolent ones to the same team and they could suffer together. Anyone have a mind-reading machine handy?