With Easter just around the corner and two young kids at home, my mind has inevitably turned to chocolate.
And chocolate, inevitably, reminds me of how hard it can be to conduct education research.
A few years back, I submitted a paper to SIGCSE and one of the comments I received back from a reviewer has stuck with me ever since. I’ve completely forgotten the details of the paper, but it presented some kind of teaching approach that could be used in the classroom. I had collected student survey data and reported that students enjoyed the experience. The reviewer dismissed the evaluation as largely irrelevant and stated: “If I gave out chocolate in my class then students would enjoy that too!”
Enjoyment is an important consideration, since the more that students enjoy something, the more likely they are to actually do it! But what they *do* has to be shown to be beneficial.
The more time that passes since I received that comment, the more I value it. With the perspective of distance, I’ve even come to use it as a yard-stick to measure my own research and that of others. Sure students enjoyed it – but is there evidence of some deeper and more significant benefit, or is it just chocolate? Students enjoy chocolate, but it isn’t a healthy option – too much of a good thing leaves no room for vegetables. What evidence do we have that the learning activity / software tool actually helps learning?
I recently pitched an experiment to a colleague of mine. I suggested that we could show that chocolate helped people learn how to program. In our classes, we have a big attendance problem, with less than 50% of students attending most of the time. I suggested that a free chocolate bar to each person might be sufficient motivation to get them into the class. If indeed, the chocolate was enough of a motivator to attend, and if lectures actually help students learn anything, then the class average might be higher than in previous years. In other words, offering students chocolate might produce a significant improvement in learning – perhaps a greater positive impact on learning than anything else I’ve tried recently. Unfortunately, getting the project funded is proving difficult.
I see a lot of papers that show how much student enjoy a given approach / tool. Some of them even show how it improves learning. They always make me think of chocolate.
Andrew
