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Making homework count

By Stephanie Hirschman

October 8, 2024

Homework and independent study can make a massive contribution to students’ progress, particularly when classes don’t meet daily, or students aren’t living, working or studying in anglophone environments. There are several issues to consider when setting homework.

Why students are doing homework is a fundamental question which can cover a wide spectrum of reasons. The most obvious is that it offers both teachers and students a chance to check on learning and identify areas for further review and consolidation. Exam preparation courses make use of homework to consolidate and accelerate learning and deliver results. Finally, some institutions require teachers to set homework and some clients, for example parents, believe that a course with homework offers better value for money.

Whatever the reason behind setting homework, be clear with students about how they’ll benefit from the assignment, how to do it effectively, how long they should spend on it and how it will be marked.

The homework that many people expect from a language course is “more of the same” exercises, that is, those that offer extra opportunities to practice grammar or vocabulary from the lesson.

It is also possible to bring in practice from other online or print sources, but this can sometimes be problematic, especially for lower levels. Make sure that the resource you choose maps onto the lesson content without placing extra demands on students, for example, by introducing a completely different context or topic with unfamiliar vocabulary to practice a grammar point. You also need to make sure that terminology is consistent – students who are expecting to practice present continuous may not recognize that it is also called present progressive. With lower levels, go over the instructions and/or demonstrate one of the exercises so they know how to get started.

It's worth mentioning here that flipped learning may also be a useful approach to homework. This is where students preview part of the lesson plan (like a reading or listening task) or research a general topic independently before class in order to maximize opportunities for communicative activities during the lesson.

Other types of homework include semi-controlled practice of target language. Students could write personal sentences including vocabulary items or grammatical structures from the class – note that they may need training to do this. A sentence like, “The milk went off,” is not as effective for learning as, “We had no milk for the coffee this morning – it went off because we didn’t put it in the fridge last night.” You may wish to provide some question or example prompts as support.

An unusual and motivating type of speaking homework is a personalized bingo game. Students create their own bingo card, which might be a 4x4 grid. In each cell, they write a key word or structure from the lesson that they wish to practice during the next few days. They carry the card around in their pocket, and every time they use an item of target language, they can tick it off, aiming to complete a line. This is especially suitable for students who are living, working or studying in anglophone environments. Teachers can monitor progress regularly and even offer small prizes.

The question of what teachers actually do with homework also has multiple possible responses, which will depend on the teaching context. At one end of the spectrum, if there is good buy-in from the students, teachers may only need to point them towards a selected set of “more of the same” exercises and make sure the answers are accessible for self-checking. Make it clear that you welcome questions if anything isn’t clear and test regularly to check understanding.

Whatever choices you make about homework, here’s one final tip. It’s best to complete assignments the day after receiving them and not on the same day. Research on spaced repetition shows that reviewing information after around 24 hours, “just before you forget it,” is the most effective way to boost retention.

Adapted from: https://www.linguahouse.com/blog/post/makinghomework-count

Acesso em 25/10/2024

IS A VEGAN DIET HEALTHY?

By Mary Lynch

As a registered nutritionist, the question “Is the vegan diet healthy?” is one I get all the time, especially at this time of year.

Frustratingly, the answer is that it depends as much on what you eat as with any other diet. Someone living purely on ready salted crisps or chips, for example, would be technically following a vegan diet, but it would in no way be healthy.

However, research shows that there are potential benefits to a vegan diet. A recent study indicated that the average vegan diet is higher in vitamin C and fibre, and lower in saturated fat than one containing meat. In addition, statistics show that vegans have a lower BMI (height-to-weight ratio) than meat eaters – in other words, they are skinnier.

You see, a diet without any meat or dairy products is likely to contain a lot less saturated fat, which is related to increased cholesterol levels and increased risk of heart disease. We also know that fat contains more calories per gram than other foods, and so vegans may consume fewer calories as a result. Finally, a vegan diet is generally thought to contain more cereals, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds than a non¬vegan diet.

Sounds great right? Not quite. In terms of micronutrients, a vegan diet is actually more susceptible to being nutritionally poor. A vegan diet is naturally low in calcium, vitamin D, iron, vitamin B12, zinc and omega-3 fatty acids. Therefore, if you follow a vegan diet it is essential that you get enough of these nutrients through specific vegan food sources – and may even need to take additional supplements. We have many recipes suitable for vegans that can help, just check out our vegan section. In our features we also have this traditional hummus recipe, which contains tahini – a good source of calcium, zinc and iron, which are all micronutrients hard to get a hold of on a vegan diet.

So there you have it: going vegan does not necessarily mean you are going to be healthier. In fact, I think that much of the improvement in diets among vegans is a result of education rather than going meat free. In other words, if someone chooses to go vegan they are more likely to care about what they are eating and therefore are more likely to educate themselves on the types of foods they should and should not be eating.

From: https://goo.gl/AwDYY7. Accessed on 03/22/2017.

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Autism's Drug Problem

Many people on the spectrum take multiple medications, which can lead to serious side effects and may not even be effective

Connor was diagnosed with autism early — when he was just 18 months old. His condition was already obvious by then. “He was lining things up, switching lights on and off, on and off,” says his mother, Melissa. He was bright, but he didn’t speak much until age 3, and he was easily frustrated. Once he started school, he couldn’t sit still in class, called out answers without raising his hand and got visibly upset when he couldn’t master a math concept or a handwriting task quickly enough. “One time, he rolled himself up into the carpet like a burrito and wouldn’t come out until I got there,” Melissa recalls. (All families in this story are identified by first name only, to protect their privacy.)
Connor was prescribed his first psychiatric drug, methylphenidate (Ritalin), at age 6. That didn’t last long, but when he was 7, his parents tried again. A psychiatrist suggested a low dose of amphetamine and dextroamphetamine (Adderall), a stimulant commonly used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The drug seemed to improve his time at school: He was able to sit still for longer periods of time and focus on what his teachers were saying. His chicken-scratch handwriting became legible. Then, it became neat. Then perfect. And then it became something Connor began to obsess over.
“We were told that these are the gives and takes; if it’s helping him enough to get through school, you have to decide if it’s worth it,” Melissa says. It was worth it — for a while.
But when the Adderall wore off each day, Connor had a tougher time than ever. He spent afternoons crying and refusing to do much of anything. The stimulant made it difficult for him to fall asleep at night. So after a month or two, his psychiatrist added a second medication — guanfacine (Intuniv), which is commonly prescribed for ADHD, anxiety and hypertension, but can also help with insomnia. The psychiatrist hoped it might both ease Connor’s afternoons and help him sleep.
In some ways, it had the opposite effect. His afternoons did get slightly better, but Connor developed intense mood swings and was so irritable that every evening was a struggle. Rather than simply tossing and turning in bed, he refused to even get under the covers. “He wouldn’t go to bed because he was always angry about something,” Melissa says. “He was getting himself all wound up, carrying on, getting upset at night and crying.”
wound up, carrying on, getting upset at night and crying.” After seven months, his parents declared the combination unsustainable. They swapped guanfacine for over-the-counter melatonin, which helped Connor fall asleep with no noticeable side effects. But within a year, he had acquired a tolerance for Adderall. Connor’s psychiatrist increased his dosage and that, in turn, triggered tics: Connor began jerking his head and snorting. Finally, at his 9-year physical, his doctor discovered that he’d only grown a few inches since age 7. He also hadn’t gained any weight in two years; he’d dropped from the 50th percentile in weight to the 5th. That was the end of all the experiments. His parents took him off all prescription drugs, and today, at almost 13 years old, Connor is still medication-free. His tics have mostly disappeared. Although he has trouble maintaining focus in class, his mother says that the risk-benefit ratio of trying another drug doesn’t seem worth it. “Right now we’re able to handle life without it, so we do.”
(...)
For Connor, eliminating prescription drugs was difficult, but doable. For others, multiple medications may seem indispensable. It’s not unusual for children with autism to take two, three, even four medications at once. Many adults with the condition do so, too. Data are scant in both populations, but what little information there is suggests multiple prescriptions are even more common among adults with autism than in children. Clinicians are particularly concerned about children with the condition because psychiatric medications can have long-lasting effects on their developing brains, and yet are rarely tested in children.
In general, polypharmacy — most often defined as taking more than one prescription medication at once — is commonplace in people with autism. In one study of more than 33,000 people under age 21 with the condition, at least 35 percent had taken two psychotropic medications simultaneously; 15 percent had taken three.
“Psychotropic medications are used pretty extensively in people with autism because there aren’t a lot of treatments available,” says Lisa Croen, director of the Autism Research Program at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California. “Is heavy drug use bad? That’s the question. We don’t know; it hasn’t been studied.”

Disponível em: <https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autisms-drug-problem/>. Texto adaptado.

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Educating future technology engineers

While much of the world's wireless communications technologies, such as cell phones, run on 5G mobile networks, engineers already have their eyes on developing future-generation networks. One of these engineers is Yanchao Zhang, a professor of electrical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University.

Zhang runs the DOD Center of Excellence in Future Generation Wireless Technology, or FutureG Center of Excellence. Led by ASU and funded by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the center includes collaborators from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory, the U.S. DOD and The Ohio State University.

The FutureG Center of Excellence aims to advance mobile network technology for wireless communications that are more secure, faster and more reliable. Artificial intelligence, or AI, and machine learning are also up for potential inclusion.

The center also has outreach and workforce development initiatives to increase the number of workers in the wireless communications engineering field. As part of this initiative, the center hosted a five-day FutureG Summer Research Camp on ASU's Tempe campus in May that is planned yearly.

The inaugural camp hosted 25 undergraduate students from the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering and the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, both part of the Fulton Schools. The participants learned about a variety of engineering disciplines related to electronics, including cybersecurity, signal processing, augmented and virtual reality, or AR and VR.

To choose the 25 students, Zhang and his colleagues in the FutureG Center of Excellence — Antonia Papandreou-Suppappola and Chaitali Chakrabarti, both Fulton Schools professors of electrical engineering — selected from 78 applicants.

"I was thrilled to see so many motivated, highly qualified young minds interested in cutting-edge research topics," he says. "Notably, half of the participants were women and underrepresented minority students, who were selected based on the same criteria as all applicants."

In line with the Fulton Schools value of building a foundation for all to be successful, students participated in sessions each day featuring lectures and demonstrations from experts in the topic areas. The presenters beyond Zhang included a variety of Fulton Schools electrical and computer engineering andcomputer science faculty members and external FutureG Center of Excellence collaborators.

"The goal of this summer camp is to expose highly qualified Fulton Schools undergraduate students to the latest topics and opportunities in the future generation wireless technology field and within the FutureG Center of Excellence," Zhang says. "We aim to motivate their academic and research interests in the future wireless technology area, ultimately contributing to the U.S. workforce in this field."

Among the student participants inspired to further research future wireless communications technology is Diego Quintero, a Fulton Schools undergraduate student majoring in electrical engineering who just completed his sophomore year.

Before the program, Quintero was only considering studying electrical engineering through the Fulton Schools accelerated master's degree program, which enables students to complete graduate coursework while completing their bachelor's degree, saving them time. Now he's planning to apply to the program in the 2024− 25 academic year.

Quintero says the FutureG summer camp helped him understand how the engineering skills he learned in the classroom are applied to technology development.

"Learning about such fascinating advancements in the thriving tech industry has strengthened my ideologies and passion for pursuing a career in this field," he says. "There are so many interesting careers and research opportunities. I believe it's a great way to learn more about specific roles in engineering."

For Mounia Bazzi, an undergraduate electrical engineering student who just completed the first year of her program, the FutureG summer camp helped her build on principles she learned while exploring engineering specializations. While Bazzi initially learned about using the MATLAB programming software in her FSE 100: Introduction to Engineering class, she explored MATLAB's signal processing tools in a session led by Papandreou-Suppappola.

Bazzi found that hearing from graduate students who are working with session presenters was especially helpful in learning about research conducted at ASU. The presentations inspired her interest to pursue her own research, and she contacted Guoliang Xue, a Fulton Schools professor of computer science and engineering involved in the camp, to ask if she could work under him in fall 2024.

Bazzi says her favorite part of the experience was the final day of the camp, which took place at ASU's Media and Immersive eXperience Center, or MIX Center.

"The most fun part of the camp was experiencing AR and VR systems with Dr. Robert LiKamWa," Bazzi says. "After going through different VR immersive narratives, we formed groups and used Dreamscape to build our own VR world that we then got to experience."

The session led by LiKamWa, a Fulton Schools associate

professor of electrical engineering with a joint appointment in ASU's School of Arts, Media and Engineering, was also Shannen Aganon's favorite part of the camp.

"Exploring and developing VR experiences was both exciting and educational," says Aganon, a rising senior majoring in computer science. "It is definitely interesting to see how immersive technology can transform so much."

During the camp, Aganon aimed to learn more about different engineering fields within electrical engineering.

"Attending this camp session broadened my appreciation of how different engineering disciplines interconnect and definitely allowed me to reach my goal," she says.

Aganon says the camp confirmed her passion for engineering through the variety offered within the field and the hands-on collaborative activities. She also enjoyed the networking, new friendships and skills the camp taught her

"If you would like a unique way to gain hands-on experience, this camp offers invaluable opportunities," Aganon says.

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Building on the professional consensus that no method could claim supremacy, Prabhu (1990) asks why there is no best method. He suggests that there are three possible explanations: (1) different methods are best for different teaching / learning circumstances; (2) all methods have some truth or validity; and (3) the whole notion of what is a good or a bad method is irrelevant. Prabhu argues for the third possibility and concludes that we need to rethink what is “best” such that classroom teachers and applied linguists can develop shared pedagogical perceptions of what real-world classroom teaching is.

H.D. Brown (2002), in his critique of methods, adds the following two observations: (1) so-called designer methods seem distinctive at the initial stage of learning but soon come to look like any other learner centered approach; and (2) it has proven impossible to empirically (i.e., quantitatively) demonstrate the superiority of one method over another. Brown (2002) concludes that classroom teachers do best when they ground their pedagogy in “well-established principles of language teaching and learning” (p.17).

So what are these well-established principles that teachers should apply in the post methods era? One of the early concrete proposals comes from Kamaravadivelu (1994), who offers a framework consisting of 10 macro strategies, some of which are summarized below:

– Maximize learning opportunities. The teacher’s job is not to transmit knowledge but to create and manage as many learning opportunities as possible.

– Facilitate negotiated interaction. Learners should initiate classroom talk (not just respond to the teacher’s prompts) by asking for clarification, by confirming, by reacting, and so on, as part of teacher-student and student-student interaction.

– Activate intuitive heuristics. Teachers should provide enough data for learners to infer underlying grammatical rules, since it is impossible to explicitly teach all rules of the L2.

– Integrate language skills. The separation of listening, reading, speaking, and writing is artificial. As in the real-world, learners should integrate skills: conversation (listening and speaking), note-taking (listening and writing), self-study (reading and writing), and so on.

– Raise cultural consciousness. Teachers should allow learners to become sources of cultural information so that knowledge about the culture of the L2 and of other cultures (especially those represented by the students) becomes part of classroom communication.

– Ensure social relevance: acknowledge that language learning has social, political, economic, and educational dimensions that shape the motivation to learn the L2, determine the uses to which the L2 will be put, and define the skills and proficiency level needed in the L2.

(Celce-Murcia, M. 2001. Adaptado)

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“To read these books, in this way, as an exercise in self-knowledge, carries certain risks. Risks that are both personal and political. Risks that every student of Political Philosophy has known. These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches us, and unsettles us, by confronting us with what we already know. There is an irony: the difficulty of this course consists in the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what we know from familiar unquestioned settings, and making it strange. [...] Philosophy estranges us from the familiar, not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing.

But, and here is the risk, once the familiar turns strange, it is never quite the same again. Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'. What makes this enterprise difficult, but also riveting, is that Moral and Political Philosophy is a story, and you don't know where the story would lead, but you do know that the story is about You.”

Text taken from: “Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?” Introduction Class ― Michael Sandel