Return to the APA Newsletter on Teaching
Philosophy Index The following appeared in Volume 96, Number 2 (Spring 1997) of the APA Newsletters.
TEACHING LARGE INTRODUCTION TO
PHILOSOPHY COURSES
Stephen H. Daniel
Texas A&M University
Many undergraduate philosophy programs schedule courses in introduction to philosophy that more than double the size of the traditional 35-40 student class. Indeed, it is now not uncommon to hear of courses in not only introductory logic but also introduction to philosophy that enroll hundreds of students. In some cases, this is a result of increased student demand; in others, it is a means by which faculty are allowed to combine sections of the same course to use their time more efficiently.
Whether any philosophy class should be expanded to accommodate large numbers of students is, of course, an issue on which instructors have legitimate differences. Large classes certainly place demands on instructors that are unlike those found in the more intimate settings of Socratic exchange; and some people might reject the very idea that philosophy can be taught in large groups at all. But the fact of the matter is that large classes are here to stay. My remarks are intended to suggest ways of handling the special problems they create.
Last semester I taught an introduction to philosophy class with an enrollment of almost 350 students. The class was comprised of twelve sections of 29 students each. It met twice a week (Monday and Wednesday) for 50-minute lectures, and on Fridays each section met with a philosophy graduate teaching assistant to talk about the material discussed in that week’s lectures. There were four graduate teaching assistants assigned to the class, so each one directed discussions in three class periods on Fridays. The Friday discussions were intended to provide students with an opportunity to raise questions and exchange ideas in ways that are impractical in the large lectures.
In developing policies and procedures for the course, I focused on (1) materials, (2) presentation, and (3) testing and grading.
Materials
Making sure that enough textbooks are available only begins to handle the kinds of problems that inevitably arise in a class this large. There must be some mechanism for students who miss class for justified reasons, lose their syllabi, or raise questions outside of the instructor’s office hours to feel more like they are part of a class. That is why I created an Internet web site for the course:
http://www-phil.tamu.edu/~sdaniel/251.html
At this site students can find general information about the course, a copy of the syllabus, my notes for each class, and e-mail links to me and each of the graduate teaching assistants. Since many students are not familiar with using the web, it is important to make it as user-friendly as possible. So I embedded in the site simple click-on links to get students where I suspect they might want to go.
The web site also included hundreds of true-false and multiple-choice questions I have formulated over the years and arranged according to area (e.g., ethics, philosophy of religion, social-political philosophy). So if students want to get a sense of the kinds of questions that will be on tests or want to create practice tests for themselves, they can do so by consulting the web site. In addition, the TAs can use the questions as springboards for Friday discussions and to see where students need further guidance. More important, because students get into the habit of contacting the web site (sometimes twice a week), they feel more connected to the course and less alienated by its size.
At the beginning of the semester, I posted 622 questions at the site. For each of the tests during the semester, I made up 40 new questions; so by the end of the semester, I had added another 120 questions to the list. To keep my own attitude toward the course fresh, I intend to keep adding new questions or refining old ones each semester.
For a textbook this past semester I used Thomas I. White’s Discovering Philosophy: Brief Edition (Prentice-Hall, 1996). Reading assignments of roughly 10 to 20 pages from the text were complemented for each class by additional material posted in my notes. Topics included freedom-determinism, ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of religion, the meaning of life, and gender and philosophy.
Students were encouraged to read the text before each class, and many made it a point to print out a copy of my notes (which expanded significantly on the text) before class so that they could follow them along with the lecture and make their own marginal notes. Those students who relied solely on my notes and did not read the text found that their understanding of the material suffered as a result. Others who read the text and notes after the lecture acknowledged subsequently that they did not comprehend fine points of the lecture because they simply did not know what they were supposed to be attending to. Most students, though, greatly appreciated having the notes for the classes.
For some instructors, of course, having notes available at least one day before class might be difficult, much less posting them on the web. But if they are genuinely interested in keeping students in such a class engaged, it is well worth the effort.
I also make it a point to provide my graduate teaching assistants copies of the class notes. Even though the TAs read the class assignments and attend each class session, they inevitably differ about certain ideas raised in the lecture. By giving them the notes and an outline of each lecture, I try to ensure that they know how I understand the readings and what points need to be emphasized in the Friday discussions. However, in order to avoid the situation of having a TA teach specifically for the test, I do not give the TAs the new test questions until the test day.
Presentation
Because of the unusual dynamics of the lecture sessions of such a course, it is important to coordinate each day’s lecture as if it were a theatrical performance rather than a typical class. As hundreds of students file into the classroom and engage in conversations, I usually play a five-minute piece of music. When the music subsides (as in movie theaters), students know that class is about to begin, so there is no need to call out for their attention.
Since students in such a class already feel as if their presence or absence will not be noticed, it is important to make the presentational features of lectures as engaging as possible. Writing on a chalkboard is generally illegible from the rear of a lecture hall, and few things are duller than watching someone fiddle with an overhead projector in order to cover portions of transparencies to break up a presentation. Most students wonder why the contents of those presentations are not simply distributed as handouts or made available in a packet of course materials.
Furthermore, students will want to come to class only if they can see something different from what is available at the web site. They want to hear how points raised in the text and in the posted notes are significant, and they want to get a handle on that material. Some will know that whatever one does with a chalkboard or an overhead projector can be done much more gracefully and with much more impact with a laptop computer and a laptop projector. All will prefer presentations using Microsoft’s PowerPoint (a software package included in office versions of MS Windows) instead of overhead transparencies.
Accordingly, for each class I prepare six to eight PowerPoint slides (using fonts no smaller than 32 points) which contain remarks I would usually write on the board in a smaller class. Since I know roughly what I would write on the board anyway, having to formulate those remarks in a slide on the computer before class is no real limitation on my teaching style. Besides, the remarks are simply outlines of the notes posted at the web site. Students are very interested in having those outlines because they are not posted at the web site and they provide keys to understanding not only the notes but also the text. For the teacher, the PowerPoint comments provide a self-disciplining outline for the lecture and indicate which points students should highlight in studying for tests.
With PowerPoint I can do much more than vary layouts, backgrounds, and colors, or project text using special effects. I can also include pictures of Descartes alongside comments about the cogito, drawings of Plato’s cave that are intelligible to even the most aesthetically challenged student, and even audio and video clips as part of my presentation. In fact, there is no reason why PowerPoint presentations cannot be used in smaller classes as well.
I usually limit the slide presentation to what can fit on a 3.5" (1.4 meg) floppy disk. The software for PowerPoint is already loaded on the laptop computer, so all I need to bring to class is the disk for the day. In classrooms outfitted with an Ethernet connection, an instructor could log directly into the course’s web site or anywhere else on the Internet. While I lecture, I am not chained to the computer, because one of my graduate assistants operates the laptop and listens to changes in my comments to know when to advance the slide to the next point in the discussion. With a remote mouse, an instructor without an assistant could move around the room and advance slides without having to touch the computer.
All of this might sound very high tech for some philosophy teachers (who, for years, have claimed that all they need to teach is a clean classroom and some chalk). But as class sizes grow, so also should our use of equipment that would facilitate our efforts. More often than not, media centers or audio-visual equipment rooms at colleges and universities have laptops and projectors, because our colleagues in the College of Business have requested their purchase. All one usually has to do is to reserve the equipment and make sure that it is delivered and set up each class.
This last point reemphasizes the importance of recognizing that large classes are, in fact, group productions. For it all to work, the media center has to set up the laptop and projector; one of my teaching assistants has to bring a tape player for my pre-class music; and another TA has to work the computer while I lecture. If I were not to get the notes posted on the web site the day before a class, students would not have them for the lecture (and would certainly let me know about it by e-mail). Anyone who adopts such practices, therefore, should know beforehand that it entails a substantial commitment of time and effort (at least the first time through).
Testing and Grading
For many students, the most important aspect of a course turns on how their grades are determined. And in a large introduction to philosophy class, where the sheer number of students dictates the kinds and frequency of graded assignments, problems associated with how to measure student abilities and development are magnified. For reasons I have spelled out elsewhere ["Objective Format Testing in Philosophy," Metaphilosophy 11 (1980), 96-112], I think that, for introductory level courses in philosophy, properly thought-out true-false, multiple-choice questions can measure philosophical acumen as well as essays. Such questions can be formulated to identify the arguments, objections, and replies that typically appear in student essays. For example, here are some true-false and multiple-choice questions I have used:
True/False Questions:
1. To say that philosophy encourages a questioning attitude means that philosophic thinking encourages people to deny the existence of God and traditional moral beliefs.
2. Determinists argue that while most human choices and actions are caused to occur in exactly the way they do, the recognition that we are determined is itself uncaused and thus undetermined.
3. Because Bentham’s hedonistic calculus does not consider the pleasures or pains that other people experience as a result of a person’s action, it is more egoistic than Mill’s version of utilitarianism.
4. When an authentic individual engages in what Kierkegaard calls a "leap of faith," he or she finds peace and tranquillity in the knowledge that God exists.
Multiple Choice Questions:
5. Relativists think that if we recognize how moral values differ from individual to individual or culture to culture, we will see that there is no neutral, objective, or universal moral standard. From this they conclude that we should tolerate the value systems of others. But this conclusion seems to contradict their fundamental belief because it:
(a) suggests that tolerating different viewpoints has value only for relativists, not objectivists.
(b) fails to indicate how toleration can be a value only for consequentialists, not deontologists.
(c) assumes that all persons universally ought to value toleration, even those who do not actually do so.
(d) treats toleration as a value that no one ought to adopt, even though most individuals and cultures in fact do.
6. In order to avoid Hume’s conclusion that we cannot know that things in the future will always have causes, Kant argues that we know that all events in the future will have causes because:
(a) our belief that future events will have causes is so strong that it alone is sufficient to guarantee that future events will, in fact, have causes.
(b) all minds are organized in such a way that, in order for events (including future events) to be experienced at all, they must always be experienced as having a cause.
(c) cause-and-effect is a law of nature independent of human experience; regardless of whether we or any other minds experience them, events in the future will have causes.
(d) future events themselves are caused by past and present events; so we know that if future events occur at all, they will have been caused by something.
7. Both Blaise Pascal and William James say that it is reasonable to believe in the existence of God even when empirical evidence or demonstrated proof is lacking. They differ, however, in the following way:
(a) for Pascal, belief in God is justified in terms of possible afterlife rewards; for James, belief is justified in terms of how well it satisfies expectations or is consistent with our other beliefs.
(b) for Pascal, the religious life is so fulfilling that, even if there is no afterlife, people should believe for its own sake; for James, that is not enough: there must be an afterlife.
(c) for Pascal, not believing in God ignores all of the convincing evidence for his existence; for James, believing in God ignores all of the convincing evidence against God’s existence.
(d) for Pascal, belief is a bet, a wager for which one cannot give any justification one way or the other; for James, religious belief is justified by the fact that most people believe in God.
8. According to the (feminine) ethics of care, emotional involvement and sensitivity to the differing needs of other people in different situations are necessary elements in making objective moral judgments because:
(a) particular needs and situations seem to differ, but they are similar enough for general moral judgments.
(b) morality is based on nothing more than how each individual feels about things.
(c) without sympathetic, emotional involvement, we cannot understand exactly what action occurs or why it is done.
(d) sensitivity and caring are subjective expressions of rational, objective, unemotional ways of thinking.
These examples indicate how some questions ask for clarifications; others ask for reasons or justifications; and still others ask for objections and replies. In short, they ask about precisely the same kinds of things as found in essay tests. This is not to say that they should replace essay questions. It is only to point out that, in large philosophy classes, good objective-format tests are possible and might be preferable to essay tests for at least three reasons.
First, anyone who has tried to grade 80 essays knows that, by the time you read essay #57, you could probably care less what #58 says-which is unfair to the author of #58, but that is the reality. Second, when different graders are involved (as in the case of teaching assistants), it is all but impossible to guarantee that the same standards are used in grading unless all graders focus solely on points that easily could have been tested in an objective format. Third, the kinds of errors, lapses, insights, and patterns of reasoning that one finds in essays are precisely the same kinds of thinking that one can reformulate in objective-format tests. For these reasons, the only kinds of tests I gave my large introduction to philosophy class were objective-format tests.
Students (and apparently some philosophy teachers) often believe that different kinds of tests measure different skills; so objective-format tests would not be able to measure the same skills as essay tests in philosophy. I agree that if one is measuring writing skills, then objective-format tests might not be appropriate. Therefore, if one of the main goals of an introduction to philosophy course is to improve writing skills, then rigorous exercise in writing essays should be at the heart of such a course. But having three essay tests during a semester can hardly indicate a commitment to improve students’ writing skills. If the point of having students write short essays is to improve their writing, then such writing assignments should be conducted at least weekly. If the point is to provide graduate students with experience in grading essays, then there are more educationally sound ways of doing that (e.g., graduate seminars in teaching pedagogy) which do not make undergraduates their guinea pigs.
For years I suspected that student performances on well thought-out objective-format tests would parallel their abilities to write introductory-level philosophy essays. When a student suggested to me last year that she really knew the material covered on a test but that she simply had trouble putting it into written form, I decided to see if my suspicions were justified. So I gave every student in a class of 75 three tests: one true-false/multiple choice, one essay, and one 20-minute one-on-one oral exam (which, for me, meant almost non-stop oral exams for a week). The overall results confirmed what I had originally thought: depending on how the tests are set up, students do about the same regardless of test format.
Grades in the course are based on three tests and an optional final exam. Each test covers about one month of material, with the third test occurring on the last day of classes before final exams, so no new material is covered after the third test.
Each of the three tests has two parts. In the first 25 minutes of the test period, each student answers 10 true-false and 10 multiple-choice questions (which together count as 2/3 of the total test score), turns in his or her answers, and then receives a second set of 10 true-false and 10 multiple-choice questions. In the second half of the class period, students stake out small areas of the room and form groups of no more than five to interpret the questions and individually select their answers. During that second part of the test (which is worth 1/3 of the test score), the room is alive with the kind of philosophic deliberation that would warm the heart of any teacher. Because the time is short and students have to come up with answers, the group discussions are not opportunities to debate the merits of an issue-that is what the Friday sessions are about. Instead, the second part of the test is the time for students to show that they can help one another understand an issue and propose specific answers to philosophic questions. In this way, the second part of the test reinforces my intent to show how philosophical reflection is not a matter of simply expressing one’s opinions.
As one might expect, the grades on the individual part of the test average at least 10 points lower than those from the group part. Students who do not do well on the individual part obviously benefit from their association with brighter or more prepared students. They appreciate the fact that, because of their group, their grades do not fall so low as to make them lose hope of improving their performance. Because the individual part of the test is worth 2/3 of the overall score, unprepared students will still get low grades no matter how well their groups do. But any instructor worried about such students could always reduce or eliminate the group part of the test. That would mean, though, giving up a potential pedagogic benefit for the majority in order to make sure that some students do not take advantage of the situation.
There are inevitably several students who miss the large-class tests. The sooner those students complete make-up tests, the better. I have found that, on the whole, most test absences occur for legitimate reasons. Because students in those circumstances are honest enough not to consult with others who have already taken the test, they can be given the same test as the rest of the class. Of course, they have to take the group part of the test individually.
Those students who take the optional final exam answer 100 (50 true-false, 50 multiple choice) questions by themselves. The questions for the final are selected from previous tests (which I allow students to keep) and the collection of questions posted at the web site at the beginning of the semester. As a matter of policy, no one’s grade can be affected negatively by the final exam score. The final exam is cumulative and is worth 1.4 times the value of any of the tests. Since the average of the scores for the three tests is the student’s semester grade, those who have averages lower than A can choose to accept those grades without having to take the final exam. But because the weighting of the final exam can substantially improve a student’s grade, and because all 100 questions for the final are taken from the pool of questions at the web site and questions on previous tests that semester, students generally take the final exam. In fact, out of the 306 students who did not have an A prior to the final exam last semester, only 30 students chose not to take the final.
Because test answers are submitted on scan-tron answer sheets, they can be graded and returned to students by the following class (while the questions raised in the test are still fresh in their minds). There is no special grade for attendance, class participation, or logging onto the class web site. As a result, attendance in the Friday discussion sessions declines as the semester proceeds. One way to prevent this from happening would be to ask students in the 13 or so Friday sessions to write a short paragraph in answer to a question on the material from that week’s lectures. The paragraphs could be graded quickly by teaching assistants using a simple scale (1=yes, that’s it; 2=well, somewhat; 0=nope, you missed it) and a student’s 10 best scores could be counted as equivalent to a test grade. These weekly short-essay quizzes would provide teaching assistants with practice in grading essays and an added motivation for students to attend the discussion groups. Some students might actually improve their writing a bit because of the exercise. Since only ten scores will be counted, no make-up quizzes for missed Friday sessions would be needed.
In the final analysis, the success of a large introduction to philosophy class hinges on both anticipating as much as possible the kinds of problems that the size of the class presents and highlighting features of what makes any course successful. Everything from making sure that students purchase the right kind of scan-tron answer sheets to working out a system in which they turn in answers for the individual part of the test and get the questions for the group part without leaving their seats must be planned out. By attending to such details, an instructor can make the course not only an enjoyable experience for students but also a source for generating new majors.