Assessing the quality of a student-generated question repository

We present results from a study that categorizes and assesses the quality of questions and explanations authored by students, in question repositories produced as part of the summative assessment in introductory physics courses over the past two years. Mapping question quality onto the levels in the cognitive domain of Bloom's taxonomy, we find that students produce questions of high quality. More than three-quarters of questions fall into categories beyond simple recall, in contrast to similar studies of student-authored content in different subject domains. Similarly, the quality of student-authored explanations for questions was also high, with approximately 60% of all explanations classified as being of high or outstanding quality. Overall, 75% of questions met combined quality criteria, which we hypothesize is due in part to the in-class scaffolding activities that we provided for students ahead of requiring them to author questions.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figure

Einstein's Real "Biggest Blunder"

Albert Einstein's real "biggest blunder" was not the 1917 introduction into his gravitational field equations of a cosmological constant term \Lambda, rather was his failure in 1916 to distinguish between the entirely different concepts of active gravitational mass and passive gravitational mass. Had he made the distinction, and followed David Hilbert's lead in deriving field equations from a variational principle, he might have discovered a true (not a cut and paste) Einstein-Rosen bridge and a cosmological model that would have allowed him to predict, long before such phenomena were imagined by others, inflation, a big bounce (not a big bang), an accelerating expansion of the universe, dark matter, and the existence of cosmic voids, walls, filaments, and nodes.Comment: 4 pages, LaTeX, 11 references, Honorable Mention in 2012 Gravity Research Foundation Essay Award

Using Interculturally Aware Teaching Methods (in Revisiting the Characteristics of Effective Education)

Teaching interculturally was not addressed in BEST PRACTICES FOR LEGAL EDUCATION. Legal scholars have studied how legal pedagogy both reflects the values and approaches of dominant groups within legal academia (i.e., privileged white men), and also how these approaches to teaching can alienate students — such as women, students of color, and gender and sexually diverse students, among others — who do not share all of the dominant group’s traits. However, more research is required to help law teachers fully understand the extent to which the structures of legal education affect non-dominant groups and how legal education may be changed to address such impact. This section explores why the use of interculturally aware teaching methods is a best practice for law teachers, and provides general suggestions for how to do so. The section below on intercultural effectiveness for lawyers and the preceding section on humanizing legal education provide more detailed suggestions relevant to using interculturally aware teaching methods.https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/law_facbookdisplay/1052/thumbnail.jp

HIERARCHIES OF ELITISM AND GENDER: THE BLUEBOOK AND THE ALWD GUIDE

Hierarchies persist in legal academia. Some of these, while in plain view, are not so obvious because they manifest in seemingly small, mundane choices. Synecdoche is a rhetorical device used to show how one detail in a story tells the story of the whole. This Article examines hierarchies of elitism and gender through a lens of synecdoche. The focus is on the choice of citation guide. Even something as seemingly benign and neutral as choosing a citation guide can reveal hierarchies of elitism and gender bias in legal education and the legal profession. Put another way, the choice of citation guide exists in—is inextricably embedded in—structural hierarchies of the legal profession. This Article examines the ways the choice of a citation guide reinforces elitism and gender bias by examining the use of two common citation guides, The Bluebook and the ALWD Guide. The Bluebook was developed by law students engaged in prestige activities at top-ranked law schools and retains the traits of its birth. This is in contrast to the ALWD Guide, which was written by experienced, professional legal writing professors who have dedicated their careers to teaching lawyers how to practice law. The Article describes the ALWD Guide’s focus on educating students to be practitioners, and the role of elitism and gender bias in keeping the ALWD Guide from displacing The Bluebook, despite The Bluebook’s well-documented deficiencies in training attorneys. This Article describes how learning citation gives students a kind of social capital through explicit and implicit messages they receive about the relationship of citation to their aptitude for the study of law, the connections between citation and prestige activities like law reviews, and the rhetoric of citation as a proxy for “good lawyering.” It explains how the elevation of The Bluebook elevates and perpetuates elitism as a substitute for quality over the expertise of women—in this case, women working in lower-status, lower-paying positions. It ultimately uses the example of the choice of a citation guide to examine the distribution of authority, power, and resources along gender lines in society in general and in legal education. The choice of citation guide is a locus of power, and resistance to small choices that shift power accumulates into the perpetuation of the hierarchical status quo. It concludes that by using this example of synecdoche, we can examine and perhaps shift our awareness of who has power, authority, and expertise within the legal profession and move toward rebalancing this power and authority based upon real expertise

What You Do in High School Matters: The Effects of High School GPA on Educational Attainment and Labor Market Earnings in Adulthood

Using abstracted grades and other data from Add Health, we investigate the effects of cumulative high school GPA on educational attainment and labor market earnings among a sample of young adults (ages 24-34). We estimate several models with an extensive list of control variables and high school fixed effects. Results consistently show that high school GPA is a positive and statistically significant predictor of educational attainment and earnings in adulthood. Moreover, the effects are large and economically important for each gender. Interesting and somewhat unexpected findings emerge for race. Various sensitivity tests support the stability of the core findings.High school grades; Educational attainment; Earnings; Panel data

MF976

Homer K. Caley, Grass tetany, Kansas State University, March 1991