Philosophy
	Class Philosophy

Interactive Learning and Remote Polling

In this class we will be using interactive learning techniques that have been shown to improve a student's ability to understand concepts and reason quantitatively in astronomy. As well as learning about the cosmos, you will develop critical thinking and quantitative reasoning skills that will be useful to you beyond the classroom and will provide you with the ability to solve real world problems outside of Yale. In this class we will use remote polling. Each student will have individual hand-held devices with keypads and radio transmitters. The goals are to encourage thinking & discussion & interaction in class, and to let the teacher know what the class does and does not understand. This allows the teacher to spend time on the concepts which are not well understood. As much of the learning process occurs during the lecture, attendance is critical. In order to encourage attendance 5% of the final grade will be based on attendance AND the exams will be partly based on polling questions given in class.

Reading Assignments & Reading Quizzes

Since we will spend more class time on polling questions & discussion, we will spend less class time on material which is in the reading. Thus the reading assignments take on a crucial role. They should be done before class, so that you come to class with good background preparation for the lecture. In order to encourage reading ahead of time, we will have short, simple, on-line quizzes based on the reading assignments. These must be submitted electronically by 9am the day of each class. These will start the 2nd week of the semester.

Maintained by Jeff Kenney Last modified: 1/9/11