Student Engagement

I've made science raps music videos on YouTube for classes ranging from undergrad to elementary. And yet I'm trying to get out of the way. Students really ought to be the creators and the stars. We all know that person creating the song learns so much much more than someone passively listening. In this session, I'll run through many of my experiments to get students more involved in the process of creation, from writing their own verse to finishing the rhyme to making their own videos.

The presentation will demonstrate the use of music to introduce beginning statistics topics, using an "oldie but goodie" song. The demonstration illustrates how to engage students actively in counting, frequency tables, and graphs - counting words, phrases or musical beats; recording these; and creating graphs to display the generated data. Then, the activity examines using a more recent song appropriate for grade levels 6 – 10 (depending on course set-up) or pre-service teachers to create a frequency table and graph of the data.

We can effectively promote student discourse, deeper level understanding, and student content creation when we use music and hip hop to teach. Since hip hop is our youths culture we can effectively use it as a tool to build relationships and teach our next generation of learners. The key is a solid understanding of implementation within the context of social emotional, developmental, and physiological needs.

Since 2012 I have used music as a pedagogical method in ecology classes. I began by writing and performing songs based on class materials including concepts, habitats, and species' biology and posting these videos on the web. This led to production of an ecology/evolution CD entitled Natural Voices (www.garygrossman.net/natural-voices/). Questionnaire results indicated that the music videos significantly improved attitudes towards class and studying.

The Secret Society of Science Songwriters (4SW) is a student club at Northwest High School in Germantown, Maryland, advised by science instructor Avi Silber.  We will show a handful of our song-in-a-day projects over the course of time, and explain some of the additions and changes to our technique that have allowed us to improve our craft over time as well as grow as an organization.

The first three presenters' NSF-funded Project SMILES launched this May a collection of 26 interactive introductory statistics songs for which students choose inputs that will appear in the song played back to them on an online platform. While this song format may provide additional student engagement or learning (we are now analyzing data to assess this), having inputs (especially those that can vary in content or length) can greatly constrain the songwriting in expected and unexpected ways, and we have learned that not all prewritten songs can be retrofitted as interactive songs.