Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 08:05:48 EDT From: Donald Rosenthal Subject: BEGIN DISCUSSION OF PAPER 7 CHEMCONF '96 New Initiatives in Chemical Education An On-Line Symposium, June 3 to July 19, 1996 Sponsored by the American Chemical Society's Division of Chemical Education Organized by: Donald Rosenthal, Department of Chemistry, Clarkson University, and Tom O'Haver, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, The University of Maryland at College Park. It is Wednesday, July 3, 1996. I wish to thank Henry S. Rzepa, Omer Casher, Christopher Leach and Peter Murray-Rust for their paper. Discussion of Paper 6 is now over. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ There will be additional time for General Discussion between July 15 and July 19. >From 8 AM Eastern Daylight Saving Time (EDST) today until 8 AM EDST on Tuesday, July 9 you have an opportunity to discuss Paper 7: "Networked Instructional Chemistry" by Stanley Smith and Iris Stovall Your discussion and questions should be sent to: CHEMCONF@UMDD.UMD.EDU or CHEMCONF@UMDD.BITNET The SUBJECT LINE can be useful in keeping track of various discussion threads. For example: P7 - GJ - D - I. Chemistry Internet Quizzing P7 indicates the message pertains to Paper 7. GJ are the initials of the sender - George Jones D - identifies discussion (Q for a Question, A for an Answer) A brief (less than 40 character) description of the content or discussion thread. For those living outside the United States I should explain that July 4 is Independence Day - a National Holiday. Many of us will be leaving town for a long weekend and the Symposium will be in recess from July 4 to July 8. Do not expect responses from the authors or many of the participants during the recess. However, casual discussion and questions are acceptable. Thomas O'Haver (University of Maryland, Phone: (301) 405-1831 e-mail: to2@umail.umd.edu), symposium co-chair, is managing the CHEMCONF Listserv and the World Wide Web site (The URL is http://www.wam.umd.edu/~toh/ChemConf96.html). Please contact Professor O'Haver about Internet problems. Donald Rosenthal Symposium Co-Chair and Chair, Committee on Computers in Chemical Education Clarkson University Phone: 315-265-9242 E-mail: ROSEN1@CLVM.CLARKSON.EDU ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 12:38:04 -0500 From: CHEMISTRY Subject: P7 - GM - D - CAI and Ethics (Slightly long) Paper 7 is a description of a system that includes quizzes that impact directly on the grades of the students. The designers of the system under discussion are aware that students can easily trick the system, but I do not see any ameliorative aspects or procedures designed into their system for this problem. Most students are undoubtedly honest, although all students are aware when cheating is possible. If a system is designed where cheating is riskless and rewarded, a few dishonest students benefit unfairly and all students become unhappy. If the entire system is permeated with opportunities for cheating, previously honest students become cynical and cheating become commonplace. In my opinion, if computer programs are going to be used for assessment of individuals, security and veracity features need to be designed in. These aspects cannot be ignored or discounted by the proprietors. The easiest response is to say that, in the future, things will be different. Technology will develop; tools, such as cameras and fingerprint and voiceprint readers will allow the programming to uniquely identify the keyboarder. Such will be likely be available at reasonable cost at some time in the future. Until then, however, it is unacceptable, in my opinion, for scientists not to design their programs with the goal of minimizing both the incidence and impact of student trickery. I think this is in the long term best interests of the students, the educational institution, and the credibility of computer-assisted instruction in general. ************************************************* Gerald Morine, Chemistry Dept., Bemidji State University, Bemidji, Minnesota 56601-2699 USA gmchem@vax1.bemidji.msus.edu http://bsuweb.bemidji.msus.edu/~chemdept/home.html ************************************************ Post-script: (FYI): The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has made available a quite readable pamphlet aimed at science students. On Being A Scientist: Responsible Conduct In Research, and can be downloaded (free) from: http://www.nap.edu/nap/online/obas/ Other resources on the web related to ethics can be found at: Ethics Center for Science and Engineering at MIT. Web Sites on Ethics in Engineering & Science http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/org/e/ethics/www/ other.html ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 12:02:32 -0600 From: Frank Jenkins Subject: P7 - FJ - Q Student Access from Home Now that we have got our networked version of the Comprehensive Chemistry CD operational, and the Management System working, the next questions that come up concern student access from home. Schools cannot have enough computers or provide enough access time during the school day for students to benefit from this well done package of instructional material. The percentage of students having computers at home is exploding. The future for instruction by computer seems to be in allowing students passworded access to instructional software from home. What version of your chemistry software is available that will work on a 14.4 or 28.8 kb modem on a phone line? What specs are necessary for using the Comp Chem CD by remote access? (For example, cable internet access at 10 Mb is coming available in our area soon.) What provisions do you have in your license/management system to limit the access to the number of students provided for by the license or will the bandwidth of the access line provide the limit anyway? Frank -- Dr. Frank Jenkins, Frank Jenkins Science Dept. Head 3516 - 104 Street Ross Sheppard High School Edmonton AB T6J 2J7 13546 - 111 Avenue fjenkins@oanet.com Edmonton AB T5M 2P2 HP(403) 434-9610 HF(403) 436-3745 WP(403) 454-8576 WF(403) 452-7563 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 3 Jul 1996 16:59:37 -0500 From: Stan Smith Subject: Re: P7 - SS - A - CAI and Ethics At 12:38 PM 7/3/96 -0500, you wrote: >Paper 7 is a description of a system that includes quizzes that >impact directly on the grades of the students. The designers of >the system under discussion are aware that students can >easily trick the system, but I do not see any ameliorative >aspects or procedures designed into their system for this > problem. > On-line quizzes are a small part of the overall computer-based instructional system which is designed to help students learn chemistry. In those courses where cheating on quizzes is a concern we have limited access to the quiz from the proctored chemistry learning center. To work these quizzes students must present a picture ID to the proctor who authorizes access. In addition, quizzes are generated from banks of questions. Where numerical answers are involved the data are determined by algorithms seeded with random number generators. The result is that no two quizzes are the same. Students must complete the quiz and have it graded before leaving and can not get another quiz without specific authorization. This type of quiz scheme was used for about 20 years in one course with little change in average score. Stanley Smith ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 10:25:40 -0500 From: Stan Smith Subject: Re: P7 - SS - A Student Access from Home > >What version of your chemistry software is available that will work on a >14.4 or 28.8 kb modem on a phone line? >What specs are necessary for using the Comp Chem CD by remote access? (For >example, cable internet access at 10 Mb is coming available in our area soon.) Instructional software which involves large numbers of still images, movies, and interaction tends to be slow on a 14.4 or 28.8 Kb modem which distracts the student from thinking about the chemistry. The movies we are using at this time require a bandwidth of about 80Kb. We do not have access to a cable modems for testing. However, cable modems with a 10 Mb forward channel would be expected to give good performance. The reverse channel can be considerably slower since it only carries requests for files and student data. Stanley Smith ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 14:51:38 -0600 From: Frank Jenkins Subject: P7 - FJ - D CAI and Ethics >Paper 7 is a description of a system that includes quizzes that >impact directly on the grades of the students. The designers of >the system under discussion are aware that students can >easily trick the system, but I do not see any ameliorative >aspects or procedures designed into their system for this >problem. Until the Internet quizzes security issue gets solved, we all need lots of time to get the quizzes in place. For example, in our school we are setting up practice, remedial, exercise-like quizzes on LXR Test to help the students prepare for the real exam. (More and more good chemistry test item banks are coming on the market every year.) When we have got this process in place, we will be ready for the next stage--using the marks on the quizzes to count for something other than homework. This is a very useful product/process for the students in this format--even if it never progresses to the count-for-marks stage. Frank -- Dr. Frank Jenkins, Frank Jenkins Science Dept. Head 3516 - 104 Street Ross Sheppard High School Edmonton AB T6J 2J7 13546 - 111 Avenue fjenkins@oanet.com Edmonton AB T5M 2P2 HP(403) 434-9610 HF(403) 436-3745 WP(403) 454-8576 WF(403) 452-7563 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 4 Jul 1996 14:56:59 -0600 From: Frank Jenkins Subject: P7 - FJ - Q - Self Registering When using a management system such as Falcon Management System (FMS), the students are not allowed to register themselves--although they can assign themselves a password. Why would the system not allow for self-registration in a given class/course that has been set-up by the Instructor or Master? Is this a technical problem or does experience indicate that this does not work well? Frank -- Dr. Frank Jenkins, Frank Jenkins Science Dept. Head 3516 - 104 Street Ross Sheppard High School Edmonton AB T6J 2J7 13546 - 111 Avenue fjenkins@oanet.com Edmonton AB T5M 2P2 HP(403) 434-9610 HF(403) 436-3745 WP(403) 454-8576 WF(403) 452-756 ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 10:16:35 -0500 From: Stan Smith Subject: Re: P7 - SS - A - Self Registering At 02:56 PM 7/4/96 -0600, you wrote: >When using a management system such as Falcon Management System (FMS), the >students are not allowed to register themselves--although they can assign >themselves a password. Why would the system not allow for self-registration >in a given class/course that has been set-up by the Instructor or Master? Is >this a technical problem or does experience indicate that this does not work >well? In LARGE classes, student self registration would cause problems because the name some of the students use is not close enough to what is on the university roster to make it possible to correlate scores. Self registration would probably also result in some students being entered more than once under slightly different names. This would cause problems with gradebook functions. We enter the roster by getting a file from the university and have the computer enter the names. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 18:25:07 -0600 From: Frank Jenkins Subject: P7 - FJ - Q (Sub-Menus) Having used the Falcon Management System to select menu items from Comprehensive Chemistry CD for my students to use, I also find that I would like to select sub-levels of the menus. Will this be possible in the future? Frank -- Dr. Frank Jenkins, Frank Jenkins Science Dept. Head 3516 - 104 Street Ross Sheppard High School Edmonton AB T6J 2J7 13546 - 111 Avenue fjenkins@oanet.com Edmonton AB T5M 2P2 HP(403) 434-9610 HF(403) 436-3745 WP(403) 454-8576 WF(403) 452-7563 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 18:31:40 -0600 From: Frank Jenkins Subject: P7 - FJ - Q (Editing software) One of the real frustrations that I have with chemistry software is the lack of consistency in following international conventions of communications; e.g., SI and IUPAC rules. This causes real concern when our province wide exams base 10% of the students mark on communication--especially conventions of communication, including significant digits. One of the biggest current weaknesses that I see in the production of software is the lack of editing (and reviewers are not, by any stretch, editors). Software production has much to learn from textbook publishing and this is certainly, IMHO, one area where software publishing needs to show some progress. Reaction? Frank -- Dr. Frank Jenkins, Frank Jenkins Science Dept. Head 3516 - 104 Street Ross Sheppard High School Edmonton AB T6J 2J7 13546 - 111 Avenue fjenkins@oanet.com Edmonton AB T5M 2P2 HP(403) 434-9610 HF(403) 436-3745 WP(403) 454-8576 WF(403) 452-7563 ------------------------------