Skip to main content

Two or three days per week?

Last semester sort of sucked and I'm still trying to figure out why. And what I mean by 'it sucked' is that I felt like my students were more confused than in the past, more whiny than in the past, and I was often more frustrated than in the past (and I should say that I am referring entirely to my principles class - my upper-division Econ for Teachers class was fine). I think that part of it was a general issue of students (and faculty and staff) being affected by the budget cuts. I can only imagine how frustrating it must have been for students to keep straight which classes were canceled because of furloughs on any given day.

But I also wondered if part of the issue with the Principles class in particular was because I was teaching it as a Tuesday/Thursday class when I had previously taught it as a Monday/Wednesday/Friday class. Aside from the fact that I had to tweak all my materials to make lectures flow OK, I just think 75 minutes is a long time for students to be sitting there, trying to absorb information. Of course, I still broke up every class with clicker questions and some interactive stuff, but I still tried to 'cover' the same amount of information as with the three-day format and that meant that we had a lot to get through in each class. Although the total number of minutes per week is the same either way, it somehow feels more manageable with three days than two. I don't know if others have had similar experiences, and there is probably research out there that looks at such things, but whether it actually matters or not, I'm glad that I'm returning to the three-day format this spring.

Comments

  1. Rey Hernandez and I wrote a paper a couple of years ago on time of day and student learning...more frequent class meetings are better. So MWF is better than T/Th for learning (as measured by performance in the subsequent class). Further, classes meeting later in the day are better for student learning.

    Our data were from Clemson which, like many schools, doesn't offer many MWF afternoon classes. In practice, it ends up that late afternoon MW or T/Th classes are best (because MWF afternoon classes aren't offered). The paper is here: doi:10.1016/j.econedurev.2007.08.001

    So rest assured, your intuition is verified by some data!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Having taught since 1980 on a two-day-a-week schedule, I will say that moving back to a three-day-a-week schedule would be extraordinarily difficult. and if you reall want to talk about difficult scheduling, try the once-a-week-for-2.5-hours class. I have at least one of those a semester.

    But 75-minute classes are too long. After about 60 minutes (at most), I begin to get the folding-uo-of-notebooks and the putting-away-of-pens motions.

    I will also note that at my institution, there would be very strong resistance by students to moving to three-day-a-week classes. We tried it, and there was. (We are an entirely non-residential, commuter campus; many students deliberately schedule their classes so as to be here two days a week.)

    So optimal, for my students, would be shorter, less frequent classes (grin).

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Angela! Thanks for the validation! We don't have afternoon MWF classes either. My principles class meets at noon, which is sort of a pain for me but I think it's a good time for a Friday class - late enough that they have somewhat recovered from partying Thursday night and early enough that they haven't started weekend partying yet (I've resigned myself to working around the fact that SDSU is a Top 10 party school).
    @Doc: I have a colleague who teaches Principles as a once-a-week class and to be honest, I think it's a travesty. I realize it's the best set-up for the professor but there is no way those students are retaining anything. Once-a-week can be good for seminars or other courses where it's good to have the time to get into deep discussions but for Principles, I just can't see it working.

    ReplyDelete
  4. My once-a-week classes aren't (now) principles...30 years ago, when I was working in local government and teaching part-time, I did have once-a-week principles classes. Now, they are upper-division undergraduate classes (sports economics this semester) or MBA classes. But it's still not a good schedule on which to teach or learn.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments that contribute to the discussion are always welcome! Please note that spammy comments whose only purpose seems to be to direct traffic to a commercial site will be deleted.

Popular posts from this blog

What are the costs?

I came across an interesting discussion about a 19-year-old intern who was fired from The Gazette in Colorado Springs for plagiarism. There appears to be some controversy over the fact that the editor publicly named the girl in a letter to readers (explaining and apologizing for the plagiarism), with some people saying that doing so was unduly harsh because this incident will now follow her for the rest of her career. I was intrigued by this discussion for two reasons - one, it seems pretty clear to me that this was not a case of ignorance (as I have often encountered with my own students who have no idea how to paraphrase or cite correctly) and two, putting aside the offense itself, I have often struggled with how to handle situations where there are long-term repercussions for a student, repercussions that lead the overall costs to be far higher than might seem warranted for the specific situation. As an example of the latter issue, I have occasionally taught seniors who need to p

What was your high school economics experience like?

As I mentioned in my last post , I am asking my Econ for Teachers students to reflect on their reading by responding to discussion prompts. It occurred to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to share my thoughts on those issues here and see if anyone wants to chime in. For this week, the students were asked to read the California and national content standards , an article by Mark Schug and others about why social science teachers dread teaching economics and how to overcome the dread, an article by William Walstad on the importance of economics for understanding the world around us and making better personal decisions (with some evidence on the dismal state of economic literacy in this country), and another article by Walstad on the status of economic education in high schools (full citations below). The reflection prompt asks the students to then answer the following questions: What was your high school econ experience like? What do you remember most from that class? How do

When is an exam "too hard"?

By now, you may have heard about the biology professor at Louisiana State (Baton Rouge) who was removed from teaching an intro course where "more than 90 percent of the students... were failing or had dropped the class." The majority of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed story about it are supportive of the professor, particularly given that it seems like the administration did not even talk to her about the situation before acting. I tend to fall in the "there's got to be more to the story so I'll reserve judgment" camp but the story definitely struck a nerve with me, partly because I recently spent 30 minutes "debating" with a student about whether the last midterm was "too hard" and the whole conversation was super-frustrating. To give some background: I give three midterms and a cumulative final, plus have clicker points and Aplia assignments that make up about 20% of the final grade. I do not curve individual exams but will cu