Assessment versus teaching - again

The Chronicle of Higher Education has just published a commentary that chides teaching faculty for not embracing assessment. And if we don’t embrace assessment, how do we know our students are learning? Do “we rely on evidence that is dubious (teaching evaluations) or circular (grades)”, they ask?
Well, girls, why are you so interested in this issue? Oh, yes, their commentary is actually flogging their soon to be published book on assessment, so you know of their deep commitment to learning. Once again the Phactor will pull on his boots and wade into this issue because he continues to wonder why to these women presume faculty don’t know when students are learning? You think we read about it in student evaluations? Hardly. Why would you think grades circular when those grades reflect levels of learning in evidence after extensive assessment? Basically it means they don’t trust faculty to do their jobs. Or maybe things are way more subjective in their disciplines? Granted the ABCs are not a nuanced reflection of my extensive assessments, but graduate schools and employers don’t want to read my essays discussing those nuances about various students in various courses; they want a quick short-hand of relative learning, grades. When asked for recommendations, the long version is provided. No, what these twits want is what many administrators want; some sort of broad assessment "instrument" (their word, not mine) that can be used across disciplines, colleges, and universities, although they admit that neither the National Survey of Student Engagement nor any other standardized assessment instruments, blunt as they are, can capture disciplinary knowledge and approaches to critical thought. That ladies is why they bloody well need disciplinary experts like me! My basis for reaching a conclusion that students have learned something is based upon their relative abilities to meet learning measures of several sorts including their answers to exam questions.
Here’s an example from just one of my disciplinary exams for an undergraduate course in plant diversity in its entirety less the more objective portions (definitions, factoids, etc.).
1. Chloroplasts and mitochondria are two of the cellular hallmarks of eukaryotic organisms. Evaluate the hypotheses that account for these organelles based upon observations and testable predictions.
2. Complex metabolisms appear to be constructed of smaller, simpler, ancestral components, some of which adopt new functions. Use photosynthesis and phylogenetic hypotheses to illustrate this concept.
3. Relative to the chemistry of the Universe how usual are the elemental components of life?
4. Ribosomal RNA sequence data provided biologists with a new phylogenetic understanding of all living organisms and had a major effect on our definition of Kingdom Monera. Explain.
5. Chlorophyll is composed of what type of building block molecule? What does phylogeny suggest about the hypothetical origin of chlorophyll? How does it differ in function from its presumed predecessor?
6. What are extremophile organisms, and why might our perspective of what is extreme be somewhat skewed? Why is the biology of extremophiles important to our understanding of early life on Earth?
7. What is the carbon biochemical fingerprint of life and what does it tell us?
8. Why is actin and actin binding protein so important in the early evolution of eukaryotic organisms?
9. For the longest time no fossil evidence of life was known prior to the Cambrian when fossils of large conspicuous organisms suddenly appear. How was fossil evidence of ancient life found? How old and what kinds of fossils were found? Then evaluate the sudden appearance of fossils.
Now having read those do you think students who can answer such questions have failed to demonstrate any learning? Think you could pull the answers for an exam like that out of the air and BS me without having done adequate reading and study, and learned something? Do you think the instructor incapable of discriminating objectively among excellent, good, poor, and terrible answers? Oh yes, and then later concepts are built upon these concepts, so cramming and purging won't do the trick. Do you still think you can capture disciplinary knowledge and critical thought on some sort of assessment instrument that doesn't simplify it to the banal? Sorry ladies, you sound clueless about the depth, detail, and sophistication of disciplines and that is the only gap that exists between teaching and assessment, so best leave assessment to us, the real professionals.

Lamarckian evolution of cat thumbs

The Phactor has long contended that what prevents cats from becoming lord and master of all they survey is lack of an opposable thumb, which didn't stop one of our long term companions from working on door handles, cupboard doors, lids of containers, closed boxes, and the steel reinforced combination locked kibble safe. If ever obsessive desire and need for a thumb could result in thumbs, well, this cat would have been all thumbs. It has been a long time since a commercial this funny has come along. You keep expecting one of them to say, rhetorically, "Got milk?"

First Flower of Spring - A Tie!

March 2nd is early for the first flower of spring; it's more like the last flower of winter. And wouldn't you know it, two of the usual contenders tied, both opening their first flowers on the same day. And talk about spectacular floral displays; virtually 100% of students and faculty walked right by without seeing a thing. How's that for observant? The red one, witchhazel, is easy enough for most temperate zone folks, but maybe you didn't recognize silver maple, which is pretty easily missed.

O'Really Out-Foxed Again

You can be sure it's all just a big mistake and somebody will admit to showing the wrong video, but Bill O'Really and the other Fox News commentator seem to take it seriously, but as pointed by sharp-eyed viewers, this video that purports to show outside agitators causing trouble in Wisconsin, who Bill calls "professional left-wingers", shows palm trees in the background at 0:16 seconds. Now Madison Wisconsin is a lovely city with nice lakes and lots of trees, but palm trees, in Wisconsin, in a zone 4 winter? Come on. People in the know have been saying Fox just makes it up, so when some angry crowd scene is needed to make their fiction seem real, who cares where it comes from. Maybe Bill will make a public retraction. HT to Mike.
Pay attention folks. O'Really isn't the only conservative who just makes it up; here's Hucklebee going on and on about Obama growing up in Kenya, you know which is a lot like Indonesia and Hawaii and sort of near by. He misspoke, of course. This just shows what kind of president Huck'll be (cute, eh?).

BGR #37 Addendum

The Phactor has been having a problem of late with an over active spam filter. Must have that looked after one of these days. But as a result, a very nice submission, by a very nice person (Sally) was missed until after the carnival was posted, but it's such a nice link about such a nice little cycad that everyone deserves a follow up because who doesn't love cycads. And of course wish this had surfaced out of the junk mail folder before the cycad endangered species blog was posted yesterday.
As a note to BGR participants and to give credit where credit is due, visitor traffic the past two days at the Phytophactor jumped by over 50% so hope all are seeing more visits down the line, and so far Foothills Fancies is the BGR referral leader by almost a factor of 2 to 1 over No Seeds and the Accidental Botanist combined.

Plant Endangered Species - We have met the enemy, and some of them are us.

Typical, typical, and tragically sad. The Life Lines blog about endangered species based on an article in Science points out that all major groups of vertebrates are in trouble. But look at the data. Which group is suffering the most by a huge margin, by a factor of two? Yes, cycads, the most ancient living lineage of seed plants, the virtual dinosaurs of the plant kingdom. 60% of species are rated vulnerable (vu), endangered (en), or critically endangered (cr), and they have the largest proportion of species extinct in the wild (ew), and nary a mention. This is unfortunately a very typical example of the zoo-bias that permeates biology. Wish there were corrective lens for plant blindness.

Gardeners delight - 2nd law of thermodynamics negates weeds!

After a while you get tired of trying to explain biology and especially evolution to people outside of the field, and this includes mathematicians like Granville Sewell. In a recent publication GS argues that the 2nd law of thermodynamics negates evolution because order increases and the 2nd law says entropy, disorder, must increase. Ah, but as has been pointed out to the critics of evolution every single time this comes up, the Earth is not a closed system which this law refers to. There's a constant input of energy. But Granville gets clever and says he's done the math to show that when "…all we see entering is radiation and meteorite fragments,[and] it seems clear that what is entering through the boundary cannot explain the increase in order observed here."
Now the Phactor isn't a physicist or a mathematician, but let me have a crack at explaining this. Life itself has the ability to capture energy and grow which decreases entropy, locally, for a relatively short (on a cosmic scale) period of time. Life doesn't violate the 2nd law, it just slows down the increase in entropy, and no law says you can't do that. Eventually all the energy captured dissipates as heat increasing entropy. What Granville is arguing is that life is not possible, let alone evolution. Since he sees nothing entering the Earth that can increase order, evolution must be invalid. Let’s simplify things. Granville doesn’t understand biology or how life works at all, so he’s going to reject the whole thing. When a mathematician tries to unexplain biology, 2 + 2 doesn’t equal 4, it equals baloney.
But as the Panda's Thumb pointed out this is great news for gardeners because weeds can't grow and increase in numbers in your garden. And Granville's got the mathematical proof! But here’s what will happen. This foolish paper, even after being thoroughly sliced and diced by better and more mathematical minds than mine, will become the darling citation of creationists and it will be touted as “science” demonstrating why evolution is invalid.

Very nifty animated evolutionary timeline

This is simply an unparalleled animated graphic of the history of the universe. And as you might expect it starts out showing very little and nothing happens until you click on the slider and start moving along the timeline. Lots of things happen and you may have to repeat some parts to get everything. Very clever indeed.

Berry-Go-Round #37 - February 2011

With no fanfare or trumpets, no banners or bugles, here’s February 2011’s Berry-Go-Round #37 , a blog carnival of the latest plant and plant-related blogs from here, there, and yon. The Phactor has always wanted to visit yon. Thanks to all the contributors; hopefully nothing got left out, and you discover some new things, some new blogs, some new bloggers.
Let us start with people who aren’t suffering from SAD, seasonal affective disorder, in February unless it’s their rainy season. What’s Mary’s line, er, vine, er, liana? We’re dying to find out, but it’s a serial blog to be continued. Go to The Accidental Botanist and enter your guess. Over at Beetles in the Bush, Ted got over the seasonal blues with bamboo orchids, and a reminder about conducting Google searches in the native tongue wherever you are.
That poi, poi boy Matt over at The Scientist Gardener blog provides information about that tropical starchy staple, taro, past and future.
Brushing aside any thought of the tropics, Seed Aside is still in full winter mode fixing seasonal soups here, here, and here, but with a catch, the botanical ingredients are only given by their Latin names! But to be consistent, perhaps it’ll need a pinch of sodium chloride. Eat hearty folks.
No one can resist the first flower of spring motif, but darned if this isn’t a bit pessimistic for an optimistic event. But the heart-warming aspect of this Slugyard blog is that skunk cabbage is a heat generating plant; good trick for early spring flowering even if they become First Flower for the Deer?. The Digital Botanical Garden featured that pre-eminent spring flower, the primrose, and how it's floral forms intrigued prominent Victorian botanists. Lastly in this mini-theme category, over at Anybody Seen My Focus? presents a somewhat under whelming spring flower, but it's Joan’s First Wildflower of 2011: Hairy Bittercress (Cardamine hirsuta). Hailing from that 3d world state of Wisconsin so oft in the news of late is Sonoran Trees VC spotted a parasite upon a parasite, and so on infinitum, one mistletoe species as an epiparasite upon another mistletoe (good eye there), so confirmed by my downstate colleague, Dr. Dan Nickrent, a renowned expert on parasitic plants. And still more Sonoran botany from Jade Blackwater at Brainripples, pinyon pine and junipers. That’s where all the little pinyon nuts come from, and you may be sad to learn that each one is a pregnant female!
Continuing on with edible plants John over at Fascinating Experiments provides a list of his top 10 foraging for food plants. A taxonomic note of caution for the would be wild foods enthusiast; be certain of your identifications because in some of these cases a mistake could be your last.
The Phytophactor’s haploid contribution to botanical blogging featured those under appreciated plants the bryophytes: liverworts, hornworts, moss, and sphagnum moss. In an unorchestrated demonstration of great minds thinking alike the very same week, Meristemi posted a blog about those conquistadores of land: mosses. Following along on this under appreciated plant mini-theme was Foothills Fancies' blog on lichens, those ancient little symbiotic organisms that seem to be able to grow anywhere, and may in fact have been among the earliest dwellers upon land.
This was far more fun, far more interesting, and far, far more informative than watching the Oscars. Now the Phactor would like to thank everyone, and, oh, my gosh this is too exciting, and of course thanks to my parents, my lovely wife, the creators of the WWW, Al Gore, and of course, those green stars of the show.

Wake up an smell the coffee!

Last night was a meeting of the dinner group that we have been part of for over 30 years. Naturally it's a bunch of academics, and although the dinner was superb (rack of lamb with pesto, rosemary roasted potatoes, gelatos with florentines, and so on, all things mighty and good), the conversation turned to recent world (everyone's a world traveler) and domestic events. The concensus was that everyone hoped that the "Silent Majority" still existed in the USA, the real mainstream, and that sooner or later they would get aroused. Now it's not that everyone thinks things are okey-dokey, but just that the right-wing solutions presently so fashionable are simple minded at best and counter productive at worst, not to mention an affront to tolerant people. So much to my surprise while the Phactor is cruising around the web this AM he discovers the Coffee Party. Whether or not this will help provide some balance, it's hard to say, but their message does resonate right now, and it's a good logo. It can't hurt. Here's their mission statement:
"We are Americans working to create a fair and inclusive society. Our members represent the diversity of thought, background, and circumstance that is found in the cities, towns, and neighborhoods of our country. We are a meeting place for Americans seeking common ground and collective action to strengthen our democracy.
We maintain our independence from all political parties and labels. Yes, we are non-partisan, but being non-partisan does not mean we will not take positions. It means that Coffee Party members will arrive at positions based on principles and facts; not on party affiliation. By seeking and spreading accurate information, we empower ourselves to take action and participate in government based on informed decisions.
The Coffee Party provides a place where men and women of all ages, races, physical abilities, and orientations can come together for a respectful and honest exchange of ideas. We believe that by talking and learning together - we can take action to solve the problems facing our nation. Along with national goals, we encourage Coffee Party chapters across the country to pursue local and regional projects chosen by their members.
As voters and grassroots volunteers, we understand that the federal government is not our enemy, but the expression of our collective will – and we pledge to both support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them. The Coffee Party USA believes that the influence of money, and the politics of fear and exclusion, stand in the way of a government “of, by and for the people.”
We believe in the Constitution and ‘the common good’, and will work to ensure that the voices of the people - not the power of the dollar - decide the policies and the direction of our nation.
Our love of country is not based on division. It is founded on our shared belief in democracy, equality, liberty, and justice. These are the ideals that define us as a nation. This is the heritage we wish to pass on to future generations."