The style of my exam questions

As an unhealthy tradition, students like to memorise formula, facts and solutions of past year questions when they go into the exam halls. How would you make them not to do so in your paper? First, you don’t’ recycle your past year questions. Second, design questions that genuinely test the level of their understanding. To put this into practice, in most of my final exam questions for the first year students, I would include a multiple choice question section, which contained between 20 – 40 questions. It is comprised of non-calculative questions that can be answered without a calculator, designed with the intention to test the level of understanding on the theoretical aspects of certain specific physics concepts. This section is “notorious” among the students because one will have very little chance to pick the correct option without having any in-depth knowledge and logical thinking of the particular concept being tested. In addition, these questions were never recycled, hence you can’t answer the questions correctly by only memorising the past year questions. All of the answers and occasionally the full solution to these multiple choice questions would also be uploaded online. On top of these, the solution scheme may also indicate the source where these questions were adapted or inspired. A large percentage of these objective questions were original. After a few years of teaching Modern Physics ZCT 104 for example, a large body of objectives questions have been accumulated. Students were advised to go through them as an effective way to deepen their understanding on a particular topic. The solutions were themselves valuable examples to illustrate the application of the physics concepts taught in the course. When I designed these exam questions I bear in mind that these question sets would be made as a source of knowledge for the students in the future. Understandable, preparing these multiple-choice questions demands quite a bit of thinking effort. To make matter worse, these questions were also required to be translated into Bahasa Malaysia, which often meant another whole-day work for me.

Experimenting the best way to assess the coursework

Other than giving short quizzes and test, throughout the years I have also tried to devise various not-so-conventional ways to assess the students as a continuous effort to optimise the quality of the assessment. Below are some examples of my attempts.
Open book quiz was administered right after the lecture on a chapter is completed. Usually open book quiz means the solutions are not directly available in the text book. Open book quiz free students from the almost compulsory practice of rote memorisation. On the other hand, despite having the textbook available for reference, students found themselves being challenged very hard in these quizzes, and were forced to think harder. However, this attempt did not work very well. Except a few students who could think out the box, most students who were average in their learning and thinking model failed to answer well these challenging questions. The overall coursework grade for the class was so poor that I never give open book quiz again in other classes.
The “Sample Questions by Students” initiative: Students were invited to design some samples of formatted objective questions based on the topics covered in the course. These objective questions were required certain criteria, especially, they must be original (no cut-and-paste from existing resources), conceptually correct, creative, and “interesting”. Copy cat or boring questions were filtered and rejected. Once accepted, the designer of the questions would be given bonus points for the coursework. The accepted “designed questions” were edited or corrected by me, and then stored in a question bank which, like all other course-related material, was accessible online. I also promised the students to adopt some of the selected designed questions in the examination as an incentive. This initiative promoted a good sense of participation in the teaching and learning process. In addition, to design an original objective question demands thorough knowledge about the subject matter. Creating sensible questions to someone deepen the level of understanding on a particular concept in the questioner, a wonderful and interesting way to make a student become learned. A student who attempted to design a question inevitably must also get involved in an in-depth learning process. Overall, in that attempt 143 designed questions were received. Not every ones found this initiative inviting, only about less than 20% students sent in their questions, of which many are copy-cat. But those who are enthusiastic found the initiative an interesting learning experience. One thing for sure, the initiative has successfully aroused the sense of participation in the teaching of the course, at least among those who submitted. Now, the down side of the initiative. To filter through and edit tons of submitted questions, of which many were copy cat or simply nonsensical, from a large class (or around 300 students) was an exhaustive task. The expansive cost of time and effort consumed had demotivated me to exercise it again in other semesters. Nevertheless, it is otherwise an interesting assessment method which I would still like to implement in smaller classes, with the condition that extra assistance from tutors becomes available.

Assessing student's learning

Assessment is split into two parts in the courses I taught, i.e., 30% coursework and 70% final examination. The simplest way for coursework assessment is via tests which usually lasted for one hour each. Final exam is a necessary evil to measure the level of understanding by the students, and is a standard 2 or 3 hours written examination. There is little flexibility how the final exam is carried out. Fortunately, coursework assessment has more space to manoeuvre. I make good use of coursework assessment as a means to gauge, force and motivate students to learn continuously through out the semester. As a means to motivate students to revise their lecture content continuously, I devise a so-called “what get measured get done” tactics. Two tricks were employed in this tactics. The first trick is to implement weekly quizzes, and then instantly update the coursework mark and tests/quiz solutions online. Students check the solution of a quiz right after it has taken place. The latest statistics of grade distribution in the form of distribution curve would be updated once the last quiz was graded. Occasionally I would comment the latest grade distribution curve in the class as a tactic to alert the class of their overall learning progress. The key words here are “instant” and “latest online update of grade distribution information”. Thanks to the availability of web-based application, the release of the most updated coursework information delivers some immediate psychological impact to the students (that they are constantly “being measured”). The strategy has successfully imposed certain extent of positive impact in the learning attitude of the students.

SMS as a tool for lecturing

Our Asian students are traditionally a quiet breed, never speak or ask in public, especially in the lecture hall. Lecturing in USM is “easy” but unchallenging because you never got any query from the students publicly. On the other hand, they students keep smsing when the lecturer was speaking. Then I thought why not I get them to sms me instead of to their friend? My hand phone sms alert tone start to ring intermittently amidst the lecture, as I announce my mobile number to the class to encourage students to ask questions via sms. This trick works very well, and I got frequent questions from the students via sms when I was talking. When my mobile phone sms alert tone ‘interrupts’ more frequently, I feel a non-vocal rapport established between me and the anonymous sms-senders who sit among the students. This, I reckon, is one of the best ways sms can be used for more noble purpose than forwarding junk messages.

Throughout the last 7 years in USM, I have attempted many ways to incorporate electronic / IT related approaches to enhance the teaching of physics and mathematics subjects. Having no quantitative data to quantify the effectiveness in adopting electronic and IT approach in the teaching process, I dare not claim that these approaches is a more superior way to teach physics and math than a conventional no-computer approach (though I personally wish to think so). For sure, all these attempts take time to prepare, and demand quit a bit of computer know-how to implement. But ultimately, what truly matters is the personal motivation to make physics / mathematic comprehensible to the students.

My experience of using Java animation in the teaching of undergraduate physics courses

We adopted Serway as the physics textbook for the first year physics undergraduate in the School of Physics, USM. The textbook comes with a load of Java simulation in the form of attached CD given for free to the instructor by the publisher. In these CD the physics instructor can find for every chapter computer simulations to demonstrate the evolution of physical systems under some specific physical laws such as conservation of momentum, energy, and Newton’s second law. Traditionally, these laws are taught and explained using figures and oral explanation by instructors, while the formulas are rote-momorised by students. The symbolic mathematical equations, which encode a profound amount of constraint on how a physical system should behave in space and time, make no sense to many students as they can’t make connection between these equations and the real world. Now thanks to the Java simulation, the students can visualise vividly how the energy make-up of a simple harmonic pendulum changes with time as the pendulum oscillate. The students can also see with their eyes what happen to the energy make-up as a function of space and time when the pendulum is displaced with different initial amplitude. When I was a student in the 1990’s an era when PC was still not a commonplace, the only way I visualise the simple harmonic pendulum is by making blind guess in my mind and were sometimes lead to wrong pictures of the real situations. Now the Java simulation has become so well developed and easily available. It is a very wasteful act of a physics teacher to not make use of these Java simulations for undergraduate level physics teaching. Adopting simulation in my lectures for the 101 Mechanics and the 104 Modern Physics is my policy. Computer simulation is one of the most effective tools to convey the physical relevance to our word as depicted by the abstract mathematical symbols. A physics teacher who is really enthusiastic about making physics comprehensible to his/her students should be one who shows Java simulations in his/her class.

Experience with Mathematica in the teaching of a Calculus and Linear Algebra course

I once taught the calculus and linear algebra course called ZCA 110 to a class of around 80 students for a couple of semesters. For this kind of course sometimes it is rather abstract to explain certain concepts such as taking the limit of a function or the convergence of a series expansion to a function. Mathematica is a very powerful software package that can do many mathematical manipulations such as displaying the graphs of complicated function, performing algebraic and numerical integration and differentiation, expanding a function into its series representation, manipulating matrices and many more. This software is quite popular among researchers who need a convenient tool for visualisation, symbol manipulation or computationally inexpensive numerical programming. It has also proven to be quite a workable alternative approach to teach mathematics. There even exist Mathematica courses designed to teach mathematics that take advantages of the various functionalities of the software. Armed with some familiarity with Mathematica, I decided to make use of it in my Calculus and linear algebra course. I observe that students were generally amazed by the powerfulness of Mathematica. The abstract symbols on the textbook suddenly manifest themselves into vivid graphical form now visualisable on the screen. As a concrete example, when I taught series representation of a function, the student can now see it directly the graph of a series with a few terms converges gradually to the shape of the generating function when higher order terms are added. The visualisation on the screen helps to strengthen the understanding of the concept of “convergence of a series to its generating function”. Within the push of button I solved a calculus or algebraic problem from the textbook. I reckon that using Mathematica for teaching could be quite effective in making students to understand the otherwise abstract concepts. However I am also aware of the possibility that students the computational tool may divert the attention of the students away from the core mathematical concepts, resulting in over dependence on the software rather than their own brain. In addition, over demonstrating Mathematica in the class may also cause unnecessary confusion to some weak or techno-phobic students. Therefore I demonstrated the use of Mathematica only in a selected few lecture slots. In these slots I have successfully obtained the response I was after: the students are stunned, and paid all of their attention to the lecture.

To use Mathematica for teaching purpose, one has to be familiar with its syntax and a little bit of programming knowledge, on top of the mathematical concepts he/she want to demonstrate with Mathematica. This is a technical part which may be quite time consuming for those who are not computationally inclined. But once one learn up the syntax and get familiar with the programming logic, producing a few lines of codes to solve a differential equation or taking the limit of a Riemannian sum become a simple routine. At the end of the lecture I would upload the Mathematica codes used for demonstration during the class onto the course web site. Enthusiastic students then download these codes to reply on their own PC.

As a trick to attract students’ attention or to arouse their interest during the lecture, I would randomly pick a student by running a simple Mathematica code I wrote called “luckyone.m” on the projected screen. When the computer button was pressed, students would see the screen displaying the name of the “luckyone” selected randomly from the class’s name list. The randomly selected student picked by the computer random code would have to handle some question thrown by me. The atmosphere became interestingly excited when they see me running the code on the screen. Again, I gained what I wished for: their attention and aroused interest for my class.

My experience with "Easy Note Taker" in my lecture

Some lecture halls in USM are so huge that at times I develop the fallacy of conducting a concert in a 50,000 capacity stadium. Even in the moderately sized ones writing on black/white boards is something students hate me doing, for the simple reason that the writing appears too tiny on the board. I once tried to write on the transparency over the over head projector (OHP) as a way to display enlarged hand writing. But the strong light on the OHP hurts very badly my sight and causes nausea. Taking heed of the complaints by students who can’t read the writing on the board, I took the initiative to purchase an electronic gadget know as “Easy Note Taker” using the money from my own research fund. The gadget senses the movement of an electronic pen and displays the writing traced out on my laptop which was projected onto the screen. In addition, these writing can be saved as electronic copies that are kept in my laptop as a reference or be uploaded to the course web site.