I didn’t post one of these since Februray, so it’s about time! These are all my #WaveWatching Insta posts since then!
Student evaluations of teaching are biased, sexist, racist, predjudiced. My summary of Heffernan’s 2021 article
One of my pet peeves are student evaluations that are interpreted way beyond what they can actually tell us. It might be people not considering sample sizes when looking at statistics (“66,6% of students hated your class!”, “Yes, 2 out of 3 responses out of 20 students said something negative”), or not understanding that student responses to certain questions don’t tell us “objective truths” (“I learned much more from the instructor who let me just sit and listen rather than actively engaging me” (see here)). I blogged previously about a couple of articles on the subject of biases in student evaluations, which were then basically a collection of all the scary things I had read, but in no way a comprehensive overview. Therefore I was super excited when I came a sytematic review of the literature this morning. And let me tell you, looking at the literature systematically did not improve things!
In the article “Sexism, racism, prejudice, and bias: a literature review and synthesis of research surrounding student evaluations of courses and teaching.” (2021), Troy Heffernan reports on a systematic analysis of the existing literature of the last 30 years represented in the major databases, published in peer-reviewed English journals or books, and containing relevant terms like “student evaluations” in their titles, abstracts or keywords. This resulted in 136 publications being included in the study, plus an initial 47 that were found in the references of the other articles and deemed relevant.
The conclusion of the article is clear: Student evaluations of teaching are biased depending on who the students are that are evaluating, depending on the instructor’s person and prejudices that are related to characteristics they display, depending on the actual course being evaluated, and depending on many more factors not related to the instructor or what is going on in their class. Student evaluations of teaching are therefore not a tool that should be used to determine teaching quality, or to base hiring or promotion decisions on. Additionally, those groups that are already disadvantaged in their evaluation results because of personal characteristics that students are biased against, also receive abusive comments in student evaluations that are harmful to their mental health and wellbeing, which should be reason enough to change the system.
Here is a brief overview over what I consider the main points of the article:
It matters who the evaluating students are, what course you teach and what setting you are teaching in.
According to the studies compiled in the article, your course is evaluated differently depending on who the students are that are evaluating it. Female students evaluate on average 2% more positively than male students. The average evaluation improves by up to 6% when given by international students, older students, external students or students with better grades.
It also depends on what course you are teaching: STEM courses are on average evaluated less positively than courses in the social sciences and humanities. And comparing quantitative and qualitative subjects, it turns out that subjects that have a right or wrong answer are also evaluated less positively than courses where the grades are more subjective, e.g. using essays for assessment.
Additionally, student evaluations of teaching depend on even more factors beside course content and effectiveness, for example class size and general campus-related things like how clean the university is, whether there are good food options available to students, what the room setup is like, how easy to use course websites and admission processes are.
It matters who you are as a person
Many studies show that gender, ethnicity, sexual identity, and other factors have a large influence on student evaluations of teaching.
Women (or instructors wrongly perceived as female, for example by a name or avatar) are rated more negatively than men and, no matter the factual basis, receive worse ratings at objective measures like turnaround time of essays. Also the way students react to their grades depends on their instructor’s gender: When students get the grades they expected, male instructors get rewarded with better scores, when their expectations are not met, men get punished less than women. The bias is so strong that for young (under 35 years old) women teaching in male-dominated subjects, this has been shown to have an effect of up to 37% lower ratings for women.
These biases in student evaluations result in strengthening the position of an already privileged group: white, able-bodied, heterosexual, men of a certain age (ca 35-50 years old), who the students believe to be heterosexual and who are teaching in their (and their students’) first language get evaluated a lot more favourable than anybody who does not meet one or several of the criteria.
Abuse disguised as “evaluation”
Sometimes evaluations are also used by students to express anger or frustration, and this can lead to abusive comments. Those comments are not distributed equally between all instructors, though, they are a lot more likely to be directed at women and other minorities, and they are cummulative. The more minority characteristics an instructor shows, the more abusive comments they will receive. This racist, sexist, ageist, homophobic abuse is obviously hurtful and harmful to an already disadvantaged population.
My 2 cents
Reading the article, I can’t say I was surprised by the findings — unfortunately my impression of the general literature landscape on the matter was only confirmed by this systematic analysis. However, I was positively surprised to read the very direct way in which problematic aspects are called out in many places: “For example, women receive abusive comments, and academics of colour receive abusive comments, thus, a woman of colour is more likely to receive abuse because of her gender and her skin colour“. This is really disheartening to read on the one hand because it becomes so tangible and real, especially since in addition to being harmful to instructors’ mental health and well-being when they contain abuse, student evaluations are also still an important tool in determining people’s careers via hiring and promotion decisions. But on the other hand it really drives home the message and call to action to change these practices, which I really appreciate very much: “These practices not only harm the sector’s women and most underrepresented and vulnerable, it cannot be denied that [student evaluations of teaching] also actively contribute to further marginalising the groups universities declare to protect and value in their workforces.”.
So let’s get going and change evaluation practices!
Heffernan, T. (2021). Sexism, racism, prejudice, and bias: a literature review and synthesis of research surrounding student evaluations of courses and teaching. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 1-11.
An overview over what we know about what works in university teaching (based on Schneider & Preckel, 2017)
I’ve been leading a lot of workshops and doing consulting on university teaching lately, and one request that comes up over and over again is “just tell me what works!”. Here I am presenting an article that is probably the best place to start.
The famous “visible learning” study by Hattie (2009) compiled pretty much all available articles on teaching and learning, for a broad range of instructional settings. Their main conclusion was that the focus should be on visible learning, which means learning where learning goals are explicit, there is a lot of feedback happening between students and teachers throughout the interactions, and the learning process is an active and evolving endeavour, which both teachers and students reflect on and constantly try to improve.
However, what works at schools does not necessarily have to be the same that works at universities. Students are a highly select group of the general population, the ones that have been successful in the school system. For that group of people, is it still relevant what teaching methods are being used, or is the domain-specific expertise of the instructors combined with skilled students enough to enable learning?
The article “Variables associated with achievement in higher education: A systematic review of meta-analyses” by Schneider & Preckel (2017) systematically brings together what’s known about what works and what doesn’t work in university teaching, and their main findings.
Below, I am presenting the headings of the “ten cornerstone findings” as quotes from the article, but I am providing my own interpretations and thoughts based on their findings.
1. “There is broad empirical evidence related to the question what makes higher education effective.”
Even though instructors might not always be aware of it because literature on university teaching has been theoretical for a long time (or they just don’t have the time to read enough to gain an overview over the existing literature), but these days there is a lot of empirical evidence of what makes university teaching effective!
There is a HUGE body of literature on studies investigating what works and what does not, but results always depend on the exact context of the study: who taught whom where, using what methods, on what topic, … Individual studies can answer what worked in a very specific context, but they don’t usually allow for generalizations.
To help make results of studies more generally valid, scientists bring together all available studies on a particular teaching method, “type” of student or teacher in meta studies. By comparing studies in different context, they can identify success factors of applying that specific method across different contexts, thus making it easier to give more general recommendations of what methods to use, and how.
But then if you aren’t just interested in how to use one method, but what design principles you should be applying in general, you might want to look at systematic reviews of meta-studies. Systematic review of meta-studies bring together everything that has been published on a given topic and try to distill the essence from that. One such systematic review of meta-studies is the one I am presenting here, where the authors have compiled 38 meta-analyses (which were found to be all available meta-analyses relevant to higher education) and thus provide “a broad overview and a general orientation of the variables associated with achievement in higher education”.
2. “Most teaching practices have positive effect sizes, but some have much larger effect sizes than others.”
A big challenge with investigations of teaching effectiveness is that most characteristics of teaching and of learners are related to achievement. So great care needs to be taken in order to not interpret the effect one measures for example in a SoTL project as the optimal effect, because some characteristics and their related effects are much larger than others: “The real question is not whether an instructional method has an effect on achievement but whether it has a higher effect size than alternative approaches.”
This is really important to consider especially for instructors who are (planning on) trying to measure how effective they or their methods are, or who are looking in the literature for hints on what might work for them — it’s not enough to just look if a method does have a positive effect, but to consider whether even more effective alternatives might exist.
3. “The effectivity of courses is strongly related to what teachers do.”
Great news! What we do as teachers does influence how much students learn! And often times it is through really tiny things we do or don’t do, like asking open-ended questions instead of closed-ended ones, writing keywords instead of full sentences on our slides or the blackboard (for more examples, see point 5).
And there are general things within our influence as teachers that positively contribute to student learning, for example showing enthusiasm about the content we are teaching, being available to students and being helpful, and treating the students respectfully and friendly. All these behaviours help create an atmosphere in which students feel comfortable to speak their minds and interact, both with their teacher and among each others.
But it is, of course, also about what methods we chose. For example, choosing to have students work in small groups is on average more effective than having them learn both individually or as the whole group together. And small groups become most effective when students have clear responsibilities for tasks and when the group depends on all students’ inputs in order to solve the task. Cooperation and social interaction can only work when students are actively engaged, speak about their experiences, knowledge and ideas, discuss and evaluate arguments. This is what makes it so successful for learning.
4. “The effectivity of teaching methods depends on how they are implemented.”
It would be nice to know that just by using certain methods, we can increase teaching effectivity, but unfortunately they also need to be implemented in the right way. Methods can work better or not so well, depending on how they are done. For example, asking questions is not enough, we should be asking open instead of closed questions. So it is not only about using large methods, but to tweak the small moments to be conductive to learning (examples for how to do that under point 5)
Since microstructure (all the small details in teaching) is so important, it is not surprising that the more time teachers put into planning details of their courses, the higher student achievement becomes. Everything needs to be adapted to the context of each course: who the students are and what the content is. This is work!
5. “Teachers can improve the instructional quality of their courses by making a number of small changes.”
So now that we know that teachers can increase how much students learn in their classes, here is a list of what works (and many of those points are small and easy to implement!)
- Class attendance is really important for student learning. Encourage students to attend classes regularly!
- Make sure to create the culture of asking questions and engaging in discussion, for example by asking open-ended questions.
- Be really clear about the learning goals, so you can plan better and students can work towards the correct goals, not to wrong ones that they accidentally assumed.
- Help students see how what you teach is relevant to their lives, their goals, their dreams!
- Give feedback often, and make sure it is focussed on the tasks at hand and given in a way that students can use it in order to improve.
- Be friendly and respectful towards students (duh!),
- Combine spoken words with visualizations or texts, but
- When presenting slides, use only a few keywords, not half or full sentences
- Don’t put details in a presentation that don’t need to be there, not for decoration or any other purpose. They are only distracting from what you really want to show
- When you are showing a dynamic visualization (simulation or movie), give an oral rather than a written explanation with it, so the focus isn’t split between two things to look at. For static pictures, this isn’t as important.
- Use concept maps! Let students construct them themselves to organize and discuss central ideas of the course. If you provide concept maps, make sure they don’t contain too many details.
- Start each class with some form of “advance organizer” — give an overview over the topics you want to go through and the structure in which that will happen.
Even though all these points are small and easy to implement, their combined effect can be large!
6. “The combination of teacher-centered and student-centered instructional elements is more effective than either form of instruction alone.”
There was no meta-analysis directly comparing teacher-centered and student-centered teaching methods, but elements of both have high effects on student learning. The best solution is to use a combination of both, for example complementing teacher presentations by interactive elements, or having the teacher direct parts of student projects.
Social interaction is really important and maximally effective when teachers on the one hand take on the responsibility to explicitly prepare and guide activities and steer student interactions, while on the other hand giving students the space to think for themselves, choose their own paths and make their own experiences. This means that ideally we would integrate opportunities for interaction in more teacher-centered formats like lectures, as well as making sure that student-centered forms of learning (like small groups or project-based learning) are supervised and steered by the instructor.
7. “Educational technology is most effective when it complements classroom interaction.”
We didn’t have a lot of choice in the recent rise of online learning, but the good news is that it can be pretty much as effective as in-person learning in the classroom. Blended learning, i.e. combining online and in-class instruction, is even more effective, especially when it is used purposefully for visualizations and such.
Blended learning is not as successful as in-person learning when used mainly to support communication; compared to in-person, online communication is limiting social interaction (or at least it was before everybody got used to it during covid-19? Also, the article points out explicitly that instructional technologies are developing quickly and that only studies were included that were published before 2014. Therefore MOOCs, clickers, social media and other newer technologies are not included).
8. “Assessment practices are about as important as presentation practices.”
Despite constructive alignment being one of the buzzwords that is everywhere these days, the focus of most instructors is still on the presentation part of their courses, and not equally on assessment. But the results presented in the article indicate that “assessment practices are related to achievement about as strongly as presentation practices”!
But assessment does not only mean developing exam questions. It also means being explicit about learning goals and what it would look like if they were met. Learning outcomes are so important! For the instructor to plan the whole course or a single class, to develop meaningful tests of learning and then actually evaluating it, in order to give feedback to students. Students, on the other hand, need guidance on what they should focus on both in reflecting on what they learned during past lessons, preparing for future lessons, and preparing for the exam.
Assessment also means giving formative feedback (feedback with the explicit and only purpose of helping students learn or teachers improve teaching, not giving a final evaluation after the fact) throughout the whole teaching process.
Assessment also doesn’t only mean the final exam, it can also mean smaller exercises or tasks throughout the course. Testing frequently (more than two or three times per semester) helps students learn more. Requiring that students show they’ve learnt what they were supposed to learn before the instructor moves on to the next topic has a large influence on learning. And the frequent feedback that can be provided on that basis helps them learn even more.
And: assessment can also mean student-peer assessment or student self-assessment, which agree on average fairly well with assessment by the instructor but have the added benefit of explicitly thinking about learning outcomes and whether they have been achieved. Of course, this is only possible when learning outcomes are made explicit.
The assessment part is so important, because students optimize where to spend their time based on what they perceive as important, which is often related to what they will need to be able to do in order to pass an exam. The explicit nature of the learning outcomes (and their alignment with the exam) are what students use to decide what to spend time and attention on.
9. “Intelligence and prior achievement are closely related to achievement in higher education.”
Even though we as instructors have a large influence on student achievement by all the means described above, there are also student characteristics that influence how well students can achieve. Intelligence and prior achievement are correlated to how well pupils will do at university (although both are not fixed characteristics that students are born with, but formed by how much and what quality of education students attended up to that point). If we want better students, we need better schools.
10. “Students’ strategies are more directly associated with achievement than students’ personality or personal context.”
Despite student backgrounds and personalities being important for student achievement, even more important are what strategies they are using to learn, to prepare for exams, to set goals and regulate how much effort they put on what task. Successful strategies are frequent class attendance as well as a strategic approach to learning, meaning that instead of working hard non stop, students allocate time and effort to those topics and problems that are most important. But also on the small scale, what students do matters: Note taking, for example, is a much more successful strategy when students are listening to a talk without slides. When slides are present, the back-and-forth between slides and notes seems to distract students from learning.
Training strategies works best in class rather than outside in extra courses with artificial problems.
So where do we go from here?
There you have it, that was my summary of the Schneider & Preckel (2017) systematic review of meta-analyses of what works in higher education. We know now of many things that work pretty much universally, but even though many of the small practices are easy to implement, it still doesn’t tell us what methods to use for our specific class and topic. So where do we go from here? Here are a couple of points to consider:
Look for examples in your discipline! What works in your discipline might be published in literature that was either not yet used in meta-studies, or published in a meta-study after 2014 (and thus did not get included in this study). So a quick literature search might be very useful! In addition to published scientific studies, there is a wealth of information available online of what instructors perceive to be best practice (for example SERC’s Teach the Earth collection, blogs like this one, tweets collected under hashtags like #FieldWorkFix, #HigherEd). And of course always talk to people teaching the same course at a different institution or who taught it previously at yours!
Look for examples close to home! What works and what doesn’t is also culture dependent. Try to find out what works in similar courses at your institution or a neighboring one with the same or a similar student body and similar learning outcomes?
And last not least: Share your own experiences with colleagues! Via twitter, blogs, workshops, seminars. It’s always good to share experiences and discuss! And on that note — do you have any comments on this blog post? I’d love to hear from you! :)
Schneider, M., & Preckel, F. (2017). Variables associated with achievement in higher education: A systematic review of meta-analyses. Psychological bulletin, 143(6), 565.
Why students cheat (after Brimble, 2016)
Recently, one topic seemed to emerge a lot in conversations I’ve been having: Students cheating, or the fear thereof. Cheating is “easier” when exams are written online and we don’t have students directly under our noses, and to instructors it feels like cheating has increased a lot (and maybe it has!). We’ve discussed all kinds of ways to avoid cheating: Asking questions that have answers that cannot easily be googled (but caution — this tends to make things a lot more difficult than just asking for definitions!). Putting enough time pressure on students so they don’t have time to look up things they don’t know (NOT a fan of that!!!). Using many different exams in parallel where students get assigned exercises randomly so that they would at least have to make sure they are copying from someone trying to answer the same question. But one question that has been on my mind a lot is why do students cheat in the first place, and is there anything we can do as instructors to influence whether they will want to cheat?
I read the chapter “Why students cheat: an exploration of the motivators of student academic dishonesty in higher education” in the Handbook of Academic Integrity by Brimble (2016) and here are some of the points, all backed up by different studies (for references, check back to that chaper), that stood out to me:
Students are under an enormous pressure to succeed academically, yet at the same time they are real people with lives, families, responsibilities, possibly jobs, and more. Whether its because of financial considerations, expectations of parents or peers, or other reasons: Cheating might sometimes feel like it’s the only solution to survive and finish a course among competing priorities.
Since students are under such a pressure to succeed, it is important to them that the playingfield is level and others don’t get an unfair and undeserved advantage over them. If students feel like everybody else is cheating, they might feel like they have to cheat in order to keep up. Also if the workload is so high they feel like they cannot possibly manage in other ways or content is so difficult, they feel like cheating is their only way out.
Students also feel that cheating is a “victimless crime”, so no harm done, really. Especially helping other students, even if that counts in fact as cheating, isn’t perceived as doing anything wrong. Especially if courses feel irrelevant to their lives or if students don’t have a relationship with the instructor, it does not feel like they are doing anything wrong by cheating.
Also in other cases, students might not even be aware that they are cheating (for example if they are new at university, or studying in interdisciplinary programs where norms differ between programs, or in situations that are new to them (like for example in open-book online exams, where it isn’t clear what needs to be cited and what’s common knowledge?).
Students report the actions of their role models in their academic field, their instructors, are super important in forming an idea of what is right and acceptable. If instructors don’t notice that students cheat, or worse, don’t react to it by reporting and punishing such a behavior, this feels almost like encouragement to cheat more, both to the original cheater and to others who observe the situation. Students then rationalize cheating even when they know it’s wrong.
Cheating is also a repeat offense — and the more a student does it, the easier it gets.
So from reading all of that, what can we do as instructors to lower the motivation to cheat?
First: educate & involve
If students don’t know exactly what we define as cheating, they cannot be blamed if they accidentally cheat. It’s our job to help them understand what cheating means in our specific context. We can probably all be a little more explicit about what is acceptable and what is not, especially in situations where there is a grey area. Of course it’s not a fun topic, but we need to be explicit about rules and also what happens when rules aren’t adhered to.
Interestingly, apparently the more involved students are in campus culture, the more they want to protect the institution’s reputation and not cheat. So building a strong environment that includes e.g. regularly communicated honor codes that become part of the culture might be beneficial, as well as helping students identify with the course, the study program, the institution.
Second: prosecute & punish
It’s not enjoyable, but if we notice any cheating, we need to prosecute it and punish it, even though that might come at high costs to us in terms of time, conflict, admin. The literature seems to be really clear on this one: If we let things slide a little, they become acceptable.
Ideally we would know what the rules and procedures are like at our institutions if we see something that we feel is cheating, and who the people are that can support us in dealing with the situation. If not, maybe now is a good time to figure this out.
Third: engage & adapt
Cheating is more likely to occur when there are no, or only weak, instructor-student relationships. Additionally, if students don’t feel engaged in a course, if they don’t receive enough guidance by the instructor, or if a course feels irrelevant or like they aren’t learning anything anyway, students are more likely to cheat. Similarly if a course feels too difficult or too time-consuming, if the workload is too high, or if they feel treated unfairly.
So the lesson here is to build strong relationships and make the courses both engaging and relevant to students. Making sure that the learning outcomes are relevant in the curriculum and for students’ professional development is, of course, always good advice, but in the light of making students want to learn and not have them feel like they just need to tick a box (and then do it by cheating because it really doesn’t matter one way or the other). Explaining what they will be able to do once they meet the learning outcomes (both in terms of what doors the degree opens, but also what they can practically do with the skills they learned) is another common — nevertheless now particularly useful — piece of advice. And then adjusting level of difficulty and workload to something that is managable for students — again, good advice in general and now in particular!
Of course, doing all those things is not a guarantee that students won’t cheat. But to me it feels like if I’ve paid attention to all this, I did what I could do, and that then it’s on them (which makes it easier to prosecute? Hopefully?).
What do you think? Any advice on how to deal with cheating, and especially how to prevent it?
Brimble, M. (2016). Why students cheat: an exploration of the motivators of student academic dishonesty in higher education. Handbook of academic integrity, 365.
#WaveWatchingWednesday
Haven’t posted a #WaveWatchingWednesday in a while — but I am very regularly posting over on my Instagram @fascinocean_kiel. Check it out if you fancy a more regular supply of pics!
Coffee in #KitchenOceanography
For some reason my workflow regarding all things #KitchenOceanography and #WaveWatching changed at the beginning of this year. I started editing frames on the pictures I’m posting on Instagram, and, since I was most likely doing this on my computer anyway, scheduling the posts through a program on my computer, which meant that I was typing captions on the computer, too, writing a little more. But somehow that meant that I had already written everything I wanted to write about the pics and didn’t feel the urge to blog later, so … I didn’t. Until now, that is!
Here is a collection of my Instagram posts on coffee in #KitchenOceanography!
About #KitchenOceanography
At the end of last year, I did a poll on Twitter, asking what people would like to see more of in 2021: Kitchen oceanography, wave watching, teaching & scicomm tips, and other things. And 2/3rds of the respondents said they wanted more kitchen oceanography!
So obviously my strategy was to do a photo shooting and prepare … Instagram posts (did I mention I asked that question on Twitter? Yeah. Don’t ask me about the logic behind that). Anyway, below is the beginning of that series (which, on Instagram, is not posted consecutively, in case you are wondering about how often people want to see me grinning at the exact same experiment…). Enjoy!
Insta takeover on snowflake formation
Back in December, I did a takeover of the Instagram account of WissKommSquad, a community of german science communicators. I translated it over new years, but somehow never published it. I have since taken tons of much better pictures of snowflakes, but the story I’m telling here is still interesting, I think: How snow and ice form through different processes and why they look the way they do. Have fun!
(First an embedded version directly from Canva, which I used to produce the story, and then below the cut the individual pictures)
Snow Story @SWissKommSquad by Mirjam Glessmer
Continue reading
Using #WaveWatching and #KitchenOceanography to prepare students for a one-day research cruise
When students have only one day at sea, it’s important to prepare them well for what will happen there so they get the chance to make the most of the experience. For example, let’s consider a one day student cruises just outside of Bergen. Students are divided in teams that use different types of instrumentation and that investigate different questions. After the cruise, students use the data they acquired during the cruise to write a report on the data.
There are several different aspects that I would like to prepare the students for:
- Recognizing and understanding the relevant physical processes they are supposed to investigate
- Dealing with the data both onboard and once they get back home
Below, I’m expanding on my thoughts on how to do that.
Recognizing and understanding the relevant physical processes
Let’s look at two typical teams on those student cruises: the “drifter” team that deploys surface drifters and interprets the trajectories later on, and the “CTD” team that takes profiles of temperature, salinity and other properties of the water column and then interprets those afterwards.
Interpreting surface drifter data
In the area investigated during the student cruise, there are several processes that influence which way a passive surface drifter will take, e.g. tidal currents, wind-driven currents, the circulation induced by fresh land run-off, wave-induced drift. Also there might be effects of wind on the drifter (although when designing the drifters, care was taken to minimize the effect) or of other processes. The relative importance of those processes is not necessarily clear beforehand (or even when looking at the data), and it is most likely neither constant in time nor in space. So even though it seems like it should be simple enough, it’s not an easy task!
Additionally, even though students are theoretically familiar with some of the processes, their familiarity is mostly restricted to theoretical considerations of ideal cases, not with messy mixtures and real-life cases. So my suggestion would be to help them familiarize themselves with these processes, for example like this:
First: help them realize that there are many many many processes happening simultaneously
One way to do this is to provide a picture that shows many different things at once and ask students to annotate it with a certain number of processes they can spot. Knowing that there are at least four (or however many) processes to discover in the one picture they are given gives them confidence to name at least that many, or to keep looking until they’ve found that numer.
I usually use a different example, but since tomorrow is #CTDappreciationday and I’ve been looking at old CTD pics, I thought I’d give you a new one:
Obviously it would be advisable to chose a picture that shows processes related to what the students are supposed to investigate.
Second: ask them to observe a given location and observe and describe as many different (or three, or five) situations as possible
This task is similar to the first one, but not having the reassurance that there are so-and-so many processes visible at the same time makes it a little more difficult. But it’s a great exercise to try and find as many different things going on in a system, because it will later help them to think of processes that might influence their observations.
For location ideas, check out the #BergenWaveWatching series over on Elin’s blog!
Third: ask them to go & discover a process “in real life”
Now that students have seen that life is messy and processes aren’t usually occuring in isolation, but are superimposed on or interacting with others, they are ready to go find a process in real life. To prepare students of the drifter group, useful tasks could be to find (and document) instances of
- a tidal current (and how do you know it’s a tidal current and not just a regular gravity-driven current like in a river? You might have to come back at a different time, or relate the current to tide tables)
- wave propagation and current direction not being aligned (since surface waves are a lot easier to observe than current direction, it’s easy to assume they are always in the same direction. They are not!)
- land run-off forming a buoyant (and possibly differently colored) plume in saltwater (or any other water forming a plume in a larger body of water, e.g. a storm drain going into a lake)
Even if students might not find the exact process you were hoping for, that’s ok! They will probably have an explanation for why their replacement is a good one, and that means that they put some thought into it, too.
Four: ask them to observe (some of) the relevant processes in real life and collect data
I find it a very useful exercise to try and collect data on a phenomenon without any proper equipment. For example, a tidal current can be related to the position of buoys within it, or the tidal elevations can be estimated by repeatedly taking pictures of the same pylon of a bridge. And then, of course, plot the data and discuss it!
It might seem like busywork, but I would argue that it really helps practicing observational skills. And they are going to appreciate instrumentation so much more once they get to work with it later on! :-)
Five: relate it to what to expect at sea
This is the really difficult part. From their short cruise, students will come back with a data file full of numbers, i.e. the positions at the drifter at a given time. How does that relate to what they’ve been observing until now?
Well, the idea is for them to come back with so much more than just the one data file with drifter positions. Ideally, since they know how messy the system is they are about to interpret, they’ll come back with data on the wind field (either from what the atmosphere group measured, or from the regional weather forecast), with data on the tides (from tidal gauges in the area, or models), with observations of wave height to calculate Stokes drift, with observations of anything unusual (like once when one of our drifters got caught by a ship and displaced). Ideally, all the practices we did beforehand prepared them to realize that they will want to have all this data, even if only to exclude the influence of one or several of those factors.
Ok, so much for our drifter group. Now on to the CTD group!
Interpreting temperature & salinity profiles
Temperature and salinity profiles have arguably been the most important type of oceanic data in the history of oceanography. They are also not something that is easy to come by, because you typically need a ship and some instrumentation to measure them. But there are still ways to help students familiarize themselves with the idea of temperature and salinity profiles in a practical way before their cruise.
First: help them realize that there are many many many processes happening simultaneously
Temperature and salinity profiles are really difficult to interprete because there are SO MANY things influencing them! A really good way to realize that is by asking students to do a simple overturning experiment and draw profiles over time in fixed location.
Here we see that it’s not just the cooling driving a circulation, we also see salt fingering occurring as the red dye cools and thus becomes denser than the clear water at the same temperature. So even in such a simple experiment there are different processes happening at the same time!
Second: ask them to observe a given location and observe and describe as many different (or three, or five) situations as possible
Same as I suggested for the “drifter” group, possibly with a focus on processes that influence temperature and salinity (river runoff, rain, evaporation, mixing by surface waves, parts of the body of water that are in the sun vs shade). The point is not necessarily to find the most relevant process, but to recognize which processes might potentially have an influence (even if minuscule) and thus make interpretation of observations more difficult later on.
Three to five
The temperature and salinity profiles are influenced by similar processes as I described for the drifter group, because they are shaped by advection of water with different properties and from different directions. So trying to observe the processes described above makes a lot of sense here, too! As do the other steps I described above.
But now how do we prepare students to cope with the data once they are back from their cruise?
Dealing with the data
Students are provided with finished programs that read in and plot the data, that they only need to modify if they want to show things in a different way. Yet it’s surprisingly difficult for them to manage that when they come back from the cruise.
There are several aspects to dealing with data that we can help students prepare for:
- getting data into the program you want to work with, and making plots
- interpreting plots
- interpreting data
Of course, all of this could be done just by using last year’s data (and actually maybe it’s not such a bad idea to ask students to re-run someone else’s analysis, because then they KNOW it worked a year ago, so unless they changed something, it should be working again now). After reproducing last year’s figures, students could read last year’s interpretations of those figures and discuss whether they agree with them or what they would do differently (obviously this works best if last year’s interpretations are somewhat helpful).
BUT it could also be done using new data that the students generate themselves as part of their observations earlier. For example for the temperature and salinity profiles in the easy overturning experiment, they could use some depth axis and assign numbers to the profiles that qualitatively represent the shape they drew earlier (or, if you wanted to get fancy, you could probably use temperature probes in the tank and get actual numbers). The idea here is not to get data that is as complex as they would get on the cruise, but to get a data file that is similarly structured to the ones they are expecting to get, to read it in, to plot it, and maybe practice to modify axes etc..
What do you think? Any suggestions, comments, feedback?