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The Autumn Collection

Posted in Biographical, Education on September 28, 2011 by telescoper

Up bright and early again this morning, ready for the return leg (and possible extra time/penalties) of the STFC Astronomy Grants Panel deliberations in Swindon. While I slurp my coffee and crunch my toast I thought I’d try to get my brain into gear by posting a brief something.

Yesterday was the first day of our induction period for new students. Lectures proper don’t start until next week but this week we have preliminary sessions with all the freshers to show them round the laboratories, tell them how the library learning resources unit works, sort out their access to computer facilities and so on. As I’ve blogged about before, this is a bumper year for us in terms of undergraduate intake so these sessions were busier than usual. Somewhat remarkably, however, at close of play we had managed to process nearly all the students we were expecting. Usually a few  turn up late, or don’t turn up at all, but this time there seems to be only one “no show”. That must be some kind of record.

At coffee time this morning, all staff were invited to a “meet and greet” session with the new students. I’m not really involved with the undergraduate induction process but went along anyway to show moral support (and help myself to free coffee). When I arrived at the session I immediately noticed the crowd of baffled and bewildered people struggling to figure out what was going on. But that was just the members of stafff;  the students  seemed fine with it all.

Over coffee I chatted with a few students who were very friendly and relaxed, raring to get started with their studies. Let’s see how long that lasts! One student asked me “What are physicists really like?”. All I could think of to say was “some of them resemble normal people”…

I doubt if any of the new students is a reader of this blog – especially during Fresher’s Week, in which there are many distractions on offer – but in any case I’d like to welcome them all to Cardiff. If any are reading this, I wish you well in your  studies, and hope you find your time here both fruitful and enjoyable!

Just as some students start on their course others are about to complete theirs. Such is the cycle of academic life. My main administrative role in the School of Physics & Astronomy actually concerns postgraduate students. The end of this week (September 30th) is the PhD thesis deadline for several of these, so there’s been a rush of paperwork relating to arrangements for examinations for me to deal with. I’m sure there’ll be more than a few people having a relaxing tipple on Friday evening after they’ve submitted their thesis.

All in all it was a very busy but actually quite pleasant day made all the more pleasant by an unexpected outbreak of nice sunshine. Now. To Swindon.

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Advanced Level Mathematics Examination, Vintage 1981

Posted in Education with tags , , , , , , on September 26, 2011 by telescoper

It’s been a while since I posted any of my old examination papers, but I wanted to put this one up before term starts in earnest. In the following you can find both papers (Paper I and Paper 2) of the Advanced Level Mathematics Examination that I sat in 1981.

Each paper is divided into two Sections: A covers pure mathematics while B encompasses applied mathematics (i.e. mechanics) and statistics. Students were generally taught only one of the two parts of Section B and in my case it was the mechanics bit that I answered in the examination. Paper I contains slightly shorter questions than Paper 2 and more of them..

Note that slide rules were allowed, but calculators had crept in by then. In fact I used my wonderful HP32-E, complete with Reverse Polish Notation. I loved it, not least because nobody ever asked to borrow it as they didn’t understand how it worked…

I also did Further Mathematics, and will post those papers in due course, but in the meantime I stress that this is just plain Mathematics.

If it looks a bit small you can use the viewer to zoom in.

I’ll be interested in comments from anyone who sat A-Level Mathematics more recently than 1981. Do you think these papers are harder than the ones you took? Is the subject matter significantly different?

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Reflective Practice

Posted in Education with tags , , on September 9, 2011 by telescoper

I’ve just taken a short break from reading grant applications and filling in forms to read through the stack of teaching questionnaires that arrived yesterday, along with a complicated statistical analysis which I won’t even try to explain – because I  don’t understand it.

These questionnaires are handed out during a lecture, filled in by the students (anonymously), and then sent off to be analysed by a team of elves.  Doing this during a lecture ensures a reasonable rate of return; in my case about 2/3 of the students returned completed questionnaires. The results are condensed into a “Figure of Merit” (FOM) using a mystic formula of some sort. If my FOM turned out badly I would probably try to work out what it means, but since it’s quite good I’ll just assume the algorithm is excellent.

Questions on the questionnaire are divided into questions about the module (we don’t have courses, we have modules),  e.g. is it easy, hard, interesting etc, and questions about the lecturer(s), e.g. was he/she audible, legible. Generally speaking, students seemed to enjoy this particular first-year module, Astrophysical Concepts, but also thought it was difficult. In fact it’s a generic outcome of this sort of analysis that modules that are considered to be easy don’t get the best student feedback – they don’t seem to  mind so much if the material is difficult, as long as it is interesting. I think that’s where astrophysics is a lot easier to score well than, say, solid state physics.

The only thing I was disappointed with was the score for the responses to the prompt “The lecturer wrote helpful comments on the marked homework“. In fact, I didn’t write anything at all on the marked homework because I didn’t mark it – that’s usually done by PhD students,  according to a mark scheme I provide. Nevertheless, I do post full worked solutions (on a system called Learning Central) along with the mark scheme after  the scripts have been returned to students so they can easily find out where they went wrong and how they lost marks. I though that, supplemented by the comments written by the markers on the scripts,  would be sufficient feedback. Obviously not. Heigh-ho.

More interesting than the statistical analysis (to me) are the individual comments written on the reverse of the questionnaire. Most don’t write anything at all here, but there’s an opportunity to massage one’s ego by reading things like “Best lecturer this term by a long, long way”. Actually, come to think of it, that was the only one that said that.

Occasionally, however, one comes across a disgruntled response. An example was

I think the homeworks should be on Blackboard. They never are. If you misplace a homework you can never get another!

Sigh. Actually, all the homeworks were put on Blackboard (the older name for Learning Central) at the same time that I handed them out. As a matter of fact, they’re all still there…along with the solutions in a folder marked Assignments.

Anyway, Astrophysical Concepts was fun to teach and popular with the students, so obviously it had to go. It’s now been discontinued and replaced in the first year by a module about Planets. But I think some of it will make a return in a new problem-solving class for 2nd year students…

PS. In case you’re not up with the jargon, “reflective practice” is “the capacity to reflect on action so as to engage in a process of continuous learning” and is “one of the defining characteristics of professional practice” that involves “paying critical attention to the practical values and theories which inform everyday actions, by examining practice reflectively and reflexively. This leads to developmental insight.”

In other words, thinking about the stuff you do in order to do it better.

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University Physics Examinations, Vintage 1892

Posted in Education, History with tags , , on September 7, 2011 by telescoper

There recently came into my possession a book of very old school and university physics examinations, which are of interest because I’ve been posting slightly less ancient examples in recent weeks. These examinations were set by the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, which was founded in 1883,  an institution which eventually became Cardiff University. I find them absolutely fascinating.

The papers are rather fragile, as is the book containing them, so I daren’t risk trying to scan them systematically in case flattening them out causes damage. Here instead are a few random examples that I photographed on my desk, in the manner of an old-fashioned secret agent. Sorry they’re not all that clear, but you can see them blown up if you click on them.

The collection is fairly complete, covering most of classical physics, at all examination levels from university entry to final honours. For some reason, however, the papers on relativity and quantum physics appear to be missing….

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An A-level Physics Examination Paper, Vintage 1981

Posted in Education with tags , , , on September 1, 2011 by telescoper

At the risk of becoming one of the Great Bores of the Day on the subject of past examinations I thought I’d follow up  my old O-level Physics paper  with a Physics A-level examination paper to see what people think about it. It might add to the discussion over on another blog I read too.

I took this particular examination myself in 1981. Can it really be 30 years ago? Agh. Paper 1 comprised a collection of short questions of multiple-choice type from which I’ve already posted one example on this blog.  This one is Paper 2 and, as you’ll see, it consists of longer questions with a freer format.

One comment I’ll make is that Question 5 is remarkably similar to a coursework questions we have been using here in the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University in our First year Physics module on Electricity and Magnetism.

Any other comments from people who’ve done A-levels more recently would be very welcome through the Comments Box, e.g. is there anything  in this paper that you wouldn’t expect to see nowadays? Is it easier, harder, or about the same as current A-level physics papers?

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An O-level Physics Examination Paper, Vintage 1979

Posted in Education with tags , , , , on August 30, 2011 by telescoper

My recent post about the O-level Mathematics examination I took way back in 1979 seems to have generated quite a lot of comment, both here and elsewhere, so I thought I’d follow it up with a Physics examination paper to see what people think about that.

One complication with this is that I didn’t actually take Physics O-level; the School I went to preferred to offer Combined Science instead. This examination covered a general syllabus including Physics, Chemistry and Biology but was worth two O-levels rather than three. More or less, therefore, I did 2/3 of a Physics O-level.

I think the reason for choosing Combined Science rather than three separate subjects was to allow us kids the chance to take as broad a range of subjects as possible. In fact I did ten O-levels: Combined Science (2); Mathematics; Additional Mathematics; History; Geography; English Literature; English Language; French; and Latin. My best mark at O-level was in neither mathematics nor science subjects, actually, but in Latin…

Anyway, the examination for Combined Science consisted of four papers. Paper 1 was a general paper with a range of short questions in a booklet into which candidates had to write their answers in the space provided. Obviously I don’t have this paper because I handed it in. The three other papers were each on one of the main subjects and Paper 2, shown below, was the Physics paper.

This also gives me the opportunity to try out slideshare as a better way of displaying the paper than the clumsy method of photographing it on my desk I used for the Mathematics paper.  Unfortunately our temperamental scanner – which is rapidly becoming my arch enemy – seems to have missed some of the question numbers, so I put them in by hand.

The first thing that struck me about Question 5 is “During an experiment a boy obtained…”. Girls don’t do physics, obviously.

Any other comments or comparison with GCSE Physics papers should be written in the space provided.  Write clearly and legibly, and show clearly the reasoning by which you arrive at your conclusions. You may begin.

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Back to the Drawing Board

Posted in Art, Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , , on August 30, 2011 by telescoper

I came across a press release this morning which contains the following

More should be done to encourage students to use their drawing skills in science education, researchers at The University of Nottingham say.

In a paper being published in Science this week, academics say that although producing visualisations is key to scientific thinking, pupils are often not encouraged to create their own drawings to develop and demonstrate their understanding.

In the paper the authors, led by Dr Shaaron Ainsworth in the University’s School of Psychology and Learning Sciences Research Institute, said: “Scientists do not use words only but rely on diagrams, graphs, videos, photographs and other images to make discoveries, explain findings, and excite public interest.

In the light of this I thought it would be topical to post an updated version of an old piece I wrote on the theme of sketching. This is quite a strange subject for me to have picked pick because drawing is something I’m completely useless at, but I hope you’ll bear with me and hopefully it will make some sense in the end. I always thought that drawing was an important and neglected aspect of education, but I hadn’t until today any solid research to back it up!

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What  spurred me on to think about this subject was the exhibit I was  involved with for the  Architecture Biennale in Venice as part of a project called Beyond Entropy organized by the Architectural Association School of Architecture. In the course of researching this project I came across this image of the Moon as drawn by Galileo

This led to an interesting discussion about the role of drawings like this in science. Of course  the use of sketches for the scientific representation of images has been superseded by photographic techniques, initially using film and more recently by digital techniques. The advantage of these methods is that they are quicker and also more “objective”. However, there are still many amateur astronomers who make drawings of the Moon as well as objects such as Jupiter and Saturn (which Galileo also drew). Moreover there are other fields in which experienced practioners continue to use pencil drawings in preference to photographic techniques. Archaeology provides many good examples, e.g.

The reason sketching still has a role in such fields is not that it can compete with photography for accuracy or objectivity but that there’s something about the process of sketching that engages the sketcher’s brain in a  way that’s very different from taking a photograph. The connection between eye, brain and hand seems to involve a cognitive element that is extremely useful in interpreting notes at a later date. In fact it’s probably their very subjectivity that makes them useful.  A thicker stroke of the pencil, or deliberately enhanced shading, or leaving out seemingly irrelevant detail, can help pick out  features that seem to the observer to be of particular significance. Months later when you’re trying to write up what you saw from your notes, those deliberate interventions against objectivity will take you back to what you  saw with your mind, not just with your eyes.

It doesn’t even matter whether or not you can draw well. The point isn’t so much to explain to other people what you’ve seen, but to record your own interaction with the object you’ve sketched in a way that allows you to preserve something more than a surface recollection.

You might think this is an unscientific thing to do, but I don’t think it is. The scientific process involves an interplay between objective reality and theoretical interpretation and drawing can be a useful part of this discourse. It’s as if the pencil allows the observer to interact with what is observed, forming a closer bond and probably a deeper level of understanding patterns and textures. I’m not saying it replaces a purely passive recording method like photography, but it can definitely help it.

I have not a shred of psychological evidence to back this up, but I’d also assert that sketching is very good for the learning process too.  Nowadays we tend to give out handouts of diagrams involved in physics, whether they relate to the design of apparatus or the geometrical configuration of a physical system. There’s a reason for doing this – they take a long time to draw and there’s a likelihood students will make mistakes copying them down. However, I’ve always  found that the only way to really take in what a diagram is saying is to try to draw it again myself. Even if the level of draftsmanship is worse, the level of understanding is undoubtedly better.Merely looking at someone else’s representation of something won’t give your brain as a good a feeling for what it is trying to say  as you would get if you tried to draw it yourself.

Perhaps what happens is that simply looking at a diagram only involves the connection between eye and brain. Drawing a copy requires also the connection between brain and hand. Maybe  this additional connection brings in additional levels of brain functionality. Sketching iinvolves your brain in an interaction that is different from merely looking.

The problem with excessive use of handouts – and this applies not only to figures  but also to lecture notes – is that they turn teaching into a very passive process. Taking notes in your own hand, and supplementing them with your own sketches – however scribbly and incomprehensible they may appear to other people – is  a much more active way to learn than collecting a stack of printed notes and meticulously accurate diagrams. And if it was good enough for Galileo, it should good enough for most of us!

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Results and explanation (via Gowers’s Weblog)

Posted in Education with tags , , on August 26, 2011 by telescoper

I thought I’d reblog this because it pertains to my earlier post from today…

I’ve had a healthy number of responses to my question from the previous post. In case you are reading this post without having read the previous one, I shall continue after the fold, because if you read on it will render you ineligible to participate in the little experiment I am conducting. Every year in Britain, at round about this time of the year, we have the same debate. The GCSE and A-level results come out (these are taken at the ages of 1 … Read More

via Gowers’s Weblog

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Are exams getting easier?

Posted in Education with tags , , , on August 26, 2011 by telescoper

With the publication of this year’s GCSE results there’s been the usual clamour about “dumbing down” of educational standards. So are these examinations getting easier or not? I can’t answer that question because I’m far too old to have done GCSEs. The examinations I took at the equivalent stage of my school career were O-levels. But, being an inveterate hoarder of useless articles, I kept the exam papers that I took, so what I can do is put up and example the O-level papers I took (in 1979) and let you decide. I thought the Mathematics one might be of interest, so here it is or rather here they are, because there were two 2-hour written papers; there was no coursework component, so these counted 100% of the final grade.

If you’ve done GCSE mathematics recently, have a look and see what you think!

(You can click on the images to make them bigger if they’re difficult to read…)

I’d be interested in any comments you might have, especially if you’ve actually done GCSE Mathematics (recently or a long time ago). I suspect the most obvious difference is that in my day we did much more geometry…

I might put up the Physics papers if there’s enough interest!

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A Healthy Increase

Posted in Education with tags , , , on August 25, 2011 by telescoper

Up early again this morning, I thought I’d do a quick post because I just remembered that there’s a bit of a loose end I’ve left dangling for a week or so owing to my recent indisposition.

I posted about 10 days ago about my week as “responsible person” for the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University owing to the absence of all the really responsible people on their respective vacations. By sheer coincidence my week in charge spanned the day that A-level results were announced and therefore the period during which we finalised this year’s UCAS admissions process. I had thought this might be quite a stressful time because rather late in the day we were given a significant increase in funded student numbers by the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) which made it necessary for us to enter the clearing system to find the extra students.

As it turned out however the prospective students to whom we’d made offers paid back our confidence in them and a large fraction got the necessary grades. We did go into clearing, but only briefly, to pick up a relatively small number of unattached applicants who matched our criteria. I’m happy to report, therefore, that we’ve got a very healthy intake of 120 students this year, up by about 30 on last year. That’s exactly the increase we had planned for and we can cope with it without making drastic changes, such as increasing the size of tutorial groups, that would remove the personal touch that makes this such a pleasant School to work and, I hope, study in.

The hard work done all year round by admissions teams in University departments tends to be drastically undervalued, so I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Carole Tucker for doing such a great job for the School of Physics & Astronomy, ably supported by Nicola Hunt. Where we’d be without them I don’t know.

Modesty forbids me, of course, from pointing out who was acting Head of School while this all came to fruition, and who therefore really deserves the credit….

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