This is a belated picture from the Urbana Sweet Corn festival, which includes an eerie illuminated ear of corn over Main Street.

Lots to do this week, including giving a lecture on Research Methods in Psychology 216, a big team-taught introduction to developmental psychology. One aspect of the course that I've found frustrating is a set of students who attend class regularly, write down everything the instructor says, and then do extremely badly on the exams. I'm convinced that the problem is that they have trouble thinking about how the information they read is going to be turned into questions that they'll be expected to answer. If I felt that they were figuring out what the material might mean to them and their own interests and concerns, I wouldn't feel quite as bad about the situation, but my impression is that it isn't getting digested at all. Also, the state of Illinois is dramatically cutting aid to the university while limiting our ability to raise tuition. The upshot is that large lecture courses with multiple-choice exams are increasingly going to be the lot of our students. So this is a nut they need to crack.

With this in mind, I'm going to ask students to make up their own multiple choice exam questions from the chapter and lecture and post them on the course Blackboard web site. I'll comment on the questions, and I'll hope to pick a question from the set and include it on the exam. I'll reward whoever comes up with a question I can use with a gift certificate to our local coffee shop. So it won't affect their grades, but there will be some material reward as well as whatever educational gain comes from taking this stance on the material they read.

Of course, I expect that the same thing will happen that occurred when I gave an extra workshop on note-taking for this class a few years ago, that the students who participated were exactly the ones who appeared not to need it. But, particularly in a huge course taught in a large lecture hall where there's a big gulf between students and instructors, there may be some merit in making clear that exam questions come from a cognitive process rather than descending from on high.

We're also using a new book this year, Siegler, Deloache, & Rosenberg (2003), How children develop -- http://www.palgrave.com/catalogue/catalogue.asp?Title_Id=1572592494, so I need to finish revising my lecture so that I can post the pdf note-taking file.