Over in locked LiveJournal land, I read a post talking about computer science education, and how it’s biased against people who aren’t already tech geeks coming into college:<\/p>\n
\nTaking an intro CS course if you don’t already know how to program is like taking intro Spanish without ever having taken it in high school – 90% of the people in that class are ahead of you, possibly way ahead of you, on day one, and you’re working from the back. <\/p>\n
That is a brutal situation to be in, honestly, and it does nobody any favours. The people who don’t already know how to program are dealt a crushing blow to their confidence while taking an already-difficult class, and are probably just going to drop. The people who do already know how to program are going to receive another shot of self-confidence, which they almost certainly do not need, due to them being arrogant little shits as it is, and this will just put off the day when they finally realize that they are mortal.<\/p>\n
Which is why I’m surprised that it’s not absolutely standard to have, like, a 5-credit “Intro to CS” for non-programmers and a 3-credit one for people who feel they already know how to program. It seems like a straightforward idea, segregate people into groups based on experience, and spend more times drilling stuff into the people who need to learn it all from scratch, right? <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This is a problem that afflicts a lot of technical fields. We hit something fairly similar in physics, where the background assumption of even the intro classes is that students have seen some of this stuff before. This is a reasonably good assumption from a statistical point of view– I ask every year, and the vast majority of the intro students have had physics in high school– but it kind of sucks to be on the wrong side of it.<\/p>\n
The idea of providing multiple points of entry is a good one, and it comes up a lot, but it’s not general practice because the implementation details tend to be a real bear. In the end, most departments don’t do this because the staffing and resource demands are judged to be too great for the expected payoff.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There are a bunch of problems posed by having different tracks of introductory classes. First, you need a good way to sort students into the appropriate groups– you won’t get anywhere near a reasonable sort by asking students to do it themselves. Years of psychological research show that the most clueless people tend to be clueless about their own cluelessness, and will stubbornly insist that they really<\/em> belong in whchever group is deemed more advanced.<\/p>\n
You can get around this with placement tests and the like, and that works reasonably well for some subjects. Union’s Math department offers three different versions of the intro calculus curriculum, and sorts students into them primarily based on AP test scores. This runs afoul of inequalities in the high school educational system at some point, though– students who went to schools that didn’t offer AP classes, or who couldn’t afford to take the exams get shut out.<\/p>\n
You can also do a placement test, which is the approach the Chemistry department at Union uses to sort students between the couple of different versions of intro chemistry that they offer. All students attempting to take intro chemistry need to take a local placement test, and their score on that test determines which sections they’re allowed to take. This also requires a good deal of effort to implement, at least at first– you have to draw up a reasonable test, and work out a way to administer and score it in a timely manner.<\/p>\n
Once you get the students sorted into the different sections, you need to be careful to synchronize the different intro options. A key element of this sort of scheme is that the two introductory streams need to be merged at some point, and if they haven’t done the same things before that point, it just pushes the problem back a level. For several years now we have offered an honors section of the two intro classes, and I taught the next course in the major sequence a few times when the honors and non-honors sections were operating on very different curricula, and it’s not a very good situation. While both courses covered broadly the same material, they took a very different slant on it, which meant I couldn’t assume the students knew the material of either track– I had to teach it as if the subject were totally new to both groups. Which meant that each group spent a week or so being bored by my reviewing stuff they already knew how to do, but that the other group had never seen before. (The alternative being each group spending a week or so totally at sea while they tried to figure out stuff that the other group had seen before, which would completely defeat the purpose of the different tracking.)<\/p>\n
And, of course, you need to be careful to avoid stigmatizing one track or the other. If the different flavors of the intro course carry different numbers of credits, <\/p>\n
Then there’s the staffing question, which particularly affects small departments. When you split off a different track of the introductory sequence, you need somebody to teach that, and someplace to teach it. If your normal intro sequence is a large lecture taught by a single professor, that means creating two separate lectures taught by two people, which means pulling a faculty member off some other course that then doesn’t get offered. If you’re talking about a lab science, this also means tying up some teaching lab space for the new track, which may have very different lab schedules or requirements. When space is tight, that can be a real deal-breaker.<\/p>\n
And then, of course, there’s the question of what payoff you get for this. We do occasionally have students register for our introductory classes who have absolutely no high school physics, but there aren’t many of them, and very few of them are interested in the major. Now, you can argue that setting up a new introductory class would create a new audience for that sort of thing– that’s the whole idea behind the different tracks, after all: that providing a different approach would make the subject more attractive to a wider range of students– but it’s a big investment of resources to make based on hope.<\/p>\n
In the end, most departments do a bit of this sort of thing already– in physics, basically every department in the country offers an alternative introductory track aimed at students who don’t want to major in physics, but who need it for the MCAT. That provides a consistent enough demand to justify the commitment of lab and faculty resources, and ducks the problem of synchronization by not feeding into the regular major track at all. That’s about as much tracking as is practical for physics. I suspect, but am not entirely sure, that there’s something similar at work behind the different tracks in the other departments that have them– the Math department has to provide some courses that are accessible to essentially every entering student, and the Chemistry department also gets a lot of students who don’t want to be chemistry majors, but need to take enough chemistry to meet med school requirements. Setting up completely different entry points for the major track, though, is a much bigger deal than you might think right off.<\/p>\n
(It should be noted that this is largely a matter of the hierarchical nature of science, where you need a fairly specific knowledge of some basic subjects before you can go on to more advanced topics. It’s relatively common to see multiple entry tracks in the humanities and social sciences, but then, if you want to major in, say, African history, you don’t necessarily need to know anything about American history, so you can set up a sequence that appeals to students who want to know about Africa without knowing about America, and another that appeals to students who only want to know about Asia and not Europe, and so on. That doesn’t work as well in science– even if you want to do astrophysics and not atomic physics, you need to know enough quantum mechanics to understand spectroscopy, and so on.)<\/p>\n
This is not to say that something like this can’t be done– in fact, the CS department at Union has recently redone the intro sequence to provide several different flavors of the introductory course, for students with different particular interests. That’s not exactly what the original poster was asking for, but it’s pretty close. I’m not sure how that change is playing out, though– it’s fairly recent, and my knowledge is only second-hand. I don’t know if it’s led to more majors, or to a more pleasant major-track experience for students who don’t already come in as tech geeks. It does represent a significant re-working of the way things re done, though, and it’s not something any department would undertake lightly.<\/p>\n
A more common approach is to try to re-think the single introductory sequence so as to provide an experience that is different enough from the the high school curriculum to present a challenge to those with reasonably good backgrounds in the subject, while also being paced slowly enough to be accessible to students without any background. That’s the thinking behind things like the Matter and Interactions<\/a> curriculum we’re using now. Whether it’s successful or not is a subject for another long and rambling post at some later time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over in locked LiveJournal land, I read a post talking about computer science education, and how it’s biased against people who aren’t already tech geeks coming into college: Taking an intro CS course if you don’t already know how to program is like taking intro Spanish without ever having taken it in high school –… Continue reading Entry Points and Resource Allocation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5365\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}