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Flatlining in Class

This graphic should give us as teachers serious pause. It shows how the periods of the lowest nervous activity for students occurred…during class. Ouch. The good news is that “lab” seems to have been far more stimulating. Here is the full paper by Ming-Zher Poh et al.

2 Responses to "Flatlining in Class"

Mark Algee-Hewitt says:

May 24, 2012 at 11:31 am

Two thoughts which may make this paper less of an indictment of the professorial craft:

1. The study measures electro-dermal activity: the skin’s conductance of electricity which increases with the presence of moisture. That is, the peaks correspond to points at which the subject would most likely be perspiring due to stress (the same metric used in the traditional lie detector). I don’t know that I’m that uncomfortable with students not stress-perspiring in the classroom (the learning phase). It seems perfectly alright for them to be doing so while completing their assignments (the active, doing phase), but I’d like to think that the students aren’t under that kind of classroom pressure.

2. More importantly, the following sentence is buried in the article:
“In addition, one participant volunteered to wear the proposed sensor for a long-term experiment to measure EDA in situ.”
So, yes, this particular student clearly isn’t feeling much stress in class, but how eager are you to base teaching effectiveness on response rate of a single student (in an unknown discipline, at an unknown level)? Sample size, it strikes me, should be the key here.

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Andrew Piper says:

May 24, 2012 at 11:49 am

Hi Mark,

yes, sample size is too small and the method may not measure cognition closely enough versus somatic electrical activity, though this is hard to tell from the article and/or image (chores for example would appear to be physically more rigorous than homework, and yet shows up lower).

But still, its an amazing image!

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