If most of the students did bad in the exam, the problem lies with the one factor in common: the professor.
Certainly there are always individual students who fail but if most of them fail the midterm and it is only afterwards that you learn they don't understand the book then you aren't doing a very good job of tracking their progress and you aren't actually teaching them.
I don't know how large his classes are. It can certainly be hard to monitor what students are doing in a large lecture hall but in a smaller class of 20 students or so I haven't had much difficulty with students who wouldn't put their phones away when I asked them to.
Not to say the author is entirely full of it, but broad generalizations blaming the existence of cellphones for the problems of our entire culture is way too reductionist.
Class distributions vary significantly. I TA'd elementary computer programming for seven quarters.[1] Some classes were more engaged, some less. My worst was a TR 3pm: a quarter of the students failed. My best was a summer course in which I taught without a computer (except for the labs): the room wasn't equipped, so I printed the slides and wrote on transparencies.
My N of 7 isn't significant (average grades ran from 72-82%, I think, and I don't know the standard deviation), but it's worth thinking about the problem more globally than your comment suggests. We often think of student grades statistically (work that curve!), but we rarely think about it with respect to a set of classes. It's likely that this professor has had classes that were very good and very bad and some that were in between.
Reflecting honestly on my own career on the other side of the desk, I was not a very good student. I studied to pass tests, not to learn. I got a degree because failing me would have looked bad for the institution, not because I was particularly deserving.
The humiliation of that experience turned me (I think and hope) into a life-long learner--and it informed my teaching in the classroom. Failure is one of the best teachers to those willing to learn her lessons.
[1] We team-taught occasionally and always team-graded the exams (one question or section, depending, per TA) to help level the grading. We had a department policy that failing the final exam meant failing the course. We encouraged collaboration among the students on homework--less so on labs--reasoning that it would strike a balance between understanding the material and acquiring needed soft skills. Office hours policies were quite liberal: all students were welcome at all TA hours, so if you had an issue with your instructor you could visit the TA and supervisor. Complaints were taken seriously, and underperforming teachers were removed. My reviews were generally good, with the biggest complaints about my language. (I modified my class structure to spend a few minutes on vocabulary each day in response.)
{{ Edit: typo. }}
Having to be on campus ready to teach at 8am still wasn't great.
I don't keep my intention to repeat test questions secret. I do this to prepare them for pre-uni, university and professional exams which always reuse questions.
>pre-uni, university and professional exams ALWAYS reuse questions.
Is solving past questions a useful SKILL / hack for student to learn?
If you don't agree with these, then nothing else I say would matter.
If other teachers repeated test questions, it would take less time for all students to adapt and benefit. I only taught in the first school for a term, the owner wanted me to stay but I had a better paying offer. Second school, two terms. By the second term, only 3 students consistently scored below 50% in tests. And of these three, one was extremely nonchalant. And remaining two were just slow.
Make no mistake about it - all teachers repeat questions. It's just that it takes too long for a test question to show up in exam - so most would see the exam questions as fresh ones.
But I'm afraid it doesn't really address the problem at hand. What if your first exam was bad, and by repeating it, you were just repeating the same bad questions, teaching a useless skill of memorizing questions instead of understanding the material?
Context
>What if your first exam was bad
Good question but irrelevant. You ignored my questions. I want to believe that, I'm not the only one who sees that entrance exams to universities, university exams and professional exams repeat over 80% of their questions?
If all your exams were all freshly set questions, say so. If not, what wrong with preparing my students for reality?
You are not preparing the students for an appropriate diversity of exam questions if you ask the same questions each time.
The students are perhaps doing worse because they have understood, probably correctly, that your testing is not a worthwhile exercise for them.
If you don't have novel questions, you are only demonstrating that it is unimportant to learn new material, or unimportant to find a deeper understanding of the existing material.
I would gladly admit that my method is shitty if:
They only failed my subjects
Some still couldn't answer copy&paste kinda questions - open book quizzes
Other teachers didn't pad their scores at the end of the term
I'm done with this thread.
Why not having a family?
Or living in the the same country?
Or having the same educational system?
Correlation is not causation.
- Because other students in the same country succeed
- Because other students in the same educational system succeed
That argument only works if you manage to isolate the conditions to almost perfectly match a group, mine was "this teacher, teaching this subject" and the data fits.
Regardless, crying "my students use phones and all of them are failing" when there are students with other teachers that use phones as well and don't fail makes blaming phones an illogical conclusion.
I don't think data says what you imply though
> Because other students in the same country succeed
[citation needed]
The teacher in the article poses an ipothesys
- he has the suspect the phones might be partially involved in the problem
So he puts the hipotesys to test
- he asks his students what went wrong
- they answered, according to the article quotes “We don’t understand what the books say, sir. We don’t understand the words.”
- he asks them to not use their phones for 9 days, offering an extra credit as a reward
after the test he collected results. Among the other, I'll quote the first one
> “Writing a paper and not having a phone boosted productivity at least twice as much,” Elliott claimed. “You are concentrated on one task and not worrying about anything else. Studying for a test was much easier as well because I was not distracted by the phone at all.”
It looks to me that they were actually having a problem which is not their professor.
> Because other students in the same educational system succeed
Are they?
Across the Board, Scores Drop in Math and Reading for U.S. Students
https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2019-10-...
> Regardless, crying "my students use phones and all of them are failing"
That's not what he did, what you are doing is manipulative, it's a well know bias called "false premise"