DSC 95, Spring 2023 at UC San Diego

Week 8

Writing, Academic Integrity, Learning Theory

Agenda

• Writing good responses on Ed.
• Academic integrity.
• Learning theory.
• Bloom’s taxonomy.
• Active learning.

Announcements:

• Updated Final Project timeline:
• Today: Receive feedback from Suraj + tutors.
• Sunday 5/28: Submit updated draft.
• Wednesday 5/31: Give and receive feedback.
• Saturday 6/3: Submit final copy.
• No class next week – Memorial Day!

Writing

Student feedback from DSC 10 this quarter

To be taken with a grain of salt, but:

• “The staff responds to questions about homework or labs in circles, not providing direct assistance to the question at hand. Rather than providing a more simple and useful point of guidance, the staff is very wordy and confusing about their help.”
• “The responses on Ed are not helpful. I think that giving a roundabout answer does nothing and it makes me even more frustrated.”

Structuring an answer on Ed

How do we answer Ed/Campuswire questions in a way that doesn’t give them the answer, but points them in the right direction?

Come up with “recipe” for answering questions on Ed.

1. Give the student a positive affirmation on what they’ve already accomplished.
2. ​
1. If they’re confused about a concept, point them in the right direction – lecture, reference sheet, etc. Can also embed a basic example directly, and give them pointers on where to look.
2. If they’ve posted code, ask them to explain what each line is doing. Goal: correctly diagnose what they’re stuck on. Or, ask them leading questions to get them on track.
3. Once you figure out what they’re actually confused about, give them the relevant piece of information (e.g. you’re grouping on column x, but we actually want one row for every unique value of column y, so what should we group on?). Could embed code to show them why their code is wrong.
3. Remind them to follow up, remind them that we’re here to help.

Academic Integrity

Read the linked article from the Guardian (dsc95.com/weeks/08)

Thoughts?

• Person seems very angry about cheating! Advocating for much more strict courses.
• We like in-person exams.
• What if we made students less likely to feel the need to cheat?
• One class: free 100% on the project. Stuck in a group project where 9/10 people don’t really care.
• Make sure students know that GPA is not the most important thing – other things also matter, like personal projects and research opportunities.
• Just because one commits an AI violation doesn’t make them a bad person – what circumstances led to that happening?
• If you think others are, you feel like you need to so that you don’t fall behind, and it also feels more normalized.
• May feel like that they didn’t receive the same resources.
• Some cases where students didn’t think it was actually an AI violation, like working in groups.
• Exams are clear-cut, some other instances might not be.
• Possibly: students are less likely to cheat if the instructor makes it seem like a big deal.

Scenarios

In each of the following scenarios, what would you say or do?

• You decide to attend lecture for the class you’re tutoring and a student is working on their homework for the class on their laptop. You notice that students behind them are looking at their screen.
• Someone on Ed publicly posts their code along with the error they’re getting, asking for help.
• You know that a friend in the class you’re tutoring for has used Chegg to get their DSC homework answered before.
• You are in a group chat with several friends, some of whom happen to be in the course you’re tutoring for. They begin asking you questions about the course.
• You decide to attend lecture for the class you’re tutoring for, and you notice a student is filling out the attendance Google form twice.

Learning Theory

Bloom’s taxonomy

Let’s try and brainstorm questions at each level of Bloom’s Taxonomy for a particular topic in one of our courses (Inspiration):

• ​

Watch and comment

First, make sure to actually read the active learning reading from last week. Then, after watching this video, comment on what you would change about the course you’re tutoring for.

• ​

(Time Permitting) More Scenarios

Borrowed from CSE 95

Extra scenarios

You’re holding office hours for DSC 30. A DSC 20 student comes to you for help because the DSC 20 tutor is busy/there aren’t DSC 20 office hours at that time. What do you do?

• ​

Extra scenarios

During office hours, some of your students express distaste for the logistics of the class and the way the class is running this quarter. You remember that the class was run very differently when you had taken it as a student and you thought it was much better that way. What do you say to the students?

• ​

Action Items

• Keep working on your projects.
• Ask us on Slack for feedback!