computer miw,9 1
edited by JOHN W. MOORE Eastern Michigan university, ypsilanti, 4sw7
Bits and Pieces, 37 Guidelines for Authorsof Bits and Pieces appeared in July 1986. Most authors of Bits and Pieces will make available listings and/or machine-readable versions of their programs. Please read each description carefully to determine compatibility with your own-computing environment before requesting materials from any of the authors. Several proerams described in this article and marked as such are available from Project SERAPHIM. Disks are available at $5 per 6' ,"disk. $10 oer 9',"disk: oroeram listinrs and other written matekials are availabld 'for $2 each; $? domestic or $10 foreign postage and handling is required for each shipment. Make checks payable to Project SERAPHIM. T o order, or get a Project SERAPHIM Catalogue, write to: John W. Moore, Director, Project SERAPHIM, Department of Chemistry, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI 48197. (Project SERAPHIM is supported by NSF Science and Engineering Education Directorate.)
Computer Assisted Scheduling of Teaching Assistants James P. Blrk
Arizona State University. Tempe, AZ 85287 Large undergraduate instructional programs in chemistry twicallv make extensive use of teachine assistants (TA's) as i&ruciional staff. Teaching assistantsuusually are involved in laboratory instruction, in discussion periods, in grading, and in various other nonlecture capacities. The scheduling of TA workloads can be a complex process, made difficult by the fact that TA's are graduate or undergraduate students who are taking classes themselves, resulting in time conflicts that must be resolved. Other factors that must be taken into account are the areas of specialization of the TA's (especially imoortant in advanced courses). .. ~reviousteachine"exoeri. ence, preferences for different courses, and possible personalitv clashes between TA's and suoervisinr facultv. In addition, if a TA must teach more t i a n one class per week, it would be desirable that the number of different courses and different supervising faculty be minimized. I t would also be desirable to have some experienced teaching.assistants in each course. With small numbers of people and courses, scheduling of teaching assignments may not be especially difficult. At Arizona State University, however, the numbers are usually around 60 TA's, 140 sections of courses, and 30-35 supervising faculty. The manipulation of this number of schedules and preferences is a difficult and time-consuming task, subject to frequent errors and unsatisfactory results. For this reason, a computer program has been developed to assist in the scheduling TA's. The current version is written FORTRAN IV and operates on a VAX 111750 computer under
.
the VMS operating system. The program has also been used successfully on PDP 11/70, IBM 3031, and Univac 1140 computers. Very few changes were necessary to convert amone these cornnutere.. and so the Droeram should work on most mainframe computers. The program has also been compiled and run successfully on an IBM PC.' The program, ASSIGN.FOR, can be used in two modes. In automatic mode, the program ranks all the TA's in terms of suitability for a given course, then selects the TA with the hiabest rankina. In interactive mode. the rank-ordered resuits are presented and the operator selects the TA, who need not necessarily be the highest ranked. Three data files, COURSE.DAT, TA.DAT, and FACULT.DAT are required. We have written a FORTRAN program, DATAFILE.FOR, which will prompt for the required information and write it into these data files in proper format for use by ASSIGN. FOR. The course file includes information on the order in which the courses are to be assigned. The eeneral aooroach to the desien and coding of the program can be summarized by the foilowing outlinz For a given course, each TA is rated for suitability for this assignment by calculating a rating factor. This rating factor includes seven suhfactors, which contain eieht adiustable parameters. Values of these parameters were varied &ti1 the program was able to approximate the results of a manual assignment with the same data. The subfactors attempt to select TA's for each course who will satisfy the various criteria. The adjustable parameters essentially set the relative weights of these criteria:
-
.
-
If thereiaa time conflict with theTA'sclasswork,or with previous assignments, the TA is rejected. The program checks for a suitable match between the remaining workload of the TA and the workload of the course. An attemnt is made ru ti.1 out the workload oia partially assi~nrd'I'A. The program artrmprs lo m:nimi;.r rhr number of diffrrrnt rmrseaand faculry mrmbrrs, and c l w ks ro ensure rhor thrsr n u m bers do not exceed two. The program attempts to match the TA area of specialization with the area of the course. A data table is used to express the first through fourth choices of specialization for each course area. The program attempts to assign experienced TA's t o a course by considering the past teaching experience of the TA. The program attempts to satisfy TA requests for a particular faculty member and a particular course. The program attempts to satisfy faculty member requests for a particular TA.
After all these subfactors are calculated, they are summed toget an overall rating for the TA. Once all TA's are rated for a course, they are sorted in order of decreasing rating factor.
' Thanks are aue a revlewer who successf. ly tlseo the program on an iBM PC after a few modifications. A copy of tnis version of the program wil also De (ncludedon the Pr0,ect SERAPrllM IBM disk. Volume 65 Number 4
April 1988
341
In automatic mode, the program picks the required number of TA's for the course from the top of the sorted list. In interactive mode, the top 10 choices are presented, with a preselected amount of detail. The operator can request information on any other TA, if desired; then the operator selects the TA's for the course. If no satisfactory assignment can be made, the program attempts to make a switch, by backing up through the courses already assigned until a TA is found who can take the present course. Then the program checks for any incompletely assigned TA who could take one of the found TA's previously assigned courses. Possible switches are searched until a satisfactorv match is found. In interactive mode, the operator is allowed to approve or reject possible switches. This procedure is followed until all courses are assigned. Then two output files are printed, as desired. The first is a data file. which can he edited and used as an input file for a later run of the program, so all assignments need not he entered manually again. The second is a print file that includes a summary list of assignments for each TA, a course schedule, including times, rooms, and personnel, and a list of assignments and a-schedule for each TA, used to communicate the results to the TA's. This program has been used successfully by us for several years, and has saved untold numbers of hours and prevented much aggravation. The programs, sample data files, and complete documentation are available from Project SERAPHIM on an Apple or IBM disk. The programs have not these disks or 1BM microrom~~u~ers,~hut been run on can be used as a means of transporting the programs to VAX
~ i n e r aChemistry l ~xaminationi Bernhard Binder2 and Timothy M. Maflet Southern Oregon State College Ashland, OR 97520 Whether conventional examinations are the best tools for ~romotingand evaluating learning in general chemistry has been a subject of much debate. One recognized improvement is repeatahle testing, which allows students to retake an examination for a hetter score. The tooics covered remain the same, but the individual questions ;ary. This approach has been recommended bv Moore and others ( I ) although additional instructor effort is required to produre and score additional test forms. Among the reported benefits are that "effort replaces student anxiety". The development of computer-generated, repeatahle testing described in this paper produced similar benefits without the instructional work-load once the system was operating. Test 'eneration utilizes the 7200question general chcmistry data bank developed by Johnson and others (21a3 part of the SOCRATES project. The entire hank has been copied from the original SOCRATES supplied magnetic tape to six 5'1,-inch floon\.disks with anadditional 1300 ofour .. .." toeether own questions. As a next step. has been developed (in Tur. proeramminz . ho-Pascal) to generace repeat.&le tests which can he admin~steredinteracti\,ely to students with access to MSDOS mlcrocomputers. hes system has been tried out in our general chemistry course during spring and fall 1986 using IBM compatibles. Experience with programming or microcomputers is not required. To prepare a repeatahle test requires about 20 minutes when utilizing the instructor's disk (named COMPOSE). Entering the command "COMPOSE" boots the menu-driven system and then a test may be generated. I t will he identified by TEST FILE and an appropriate descriptive 342
Journal of Chemical Education
6 16 DISKS)
Figure 1. Functional flawdiagram fw computer-generated examinations. Operating system: MSDOS. Language: Turbo Pascal. Memory: 256 Kbytes.
title (course and test number). Then individual topics are selected from a well-indexed tally (with close to 400 entries) together with the number of questions per topic and points to be awarded per question. Upon completion of the test, COMPOSE prompts retrieval of all the questions within each selected topic from the data bank and forwards the entire examination to a formatted disk named TEST. Two disk drives are rewired for this generation of repeatable examinations. The student's source of repeatable, interactive examinations is the TEST disk. If several microcomputers are available, multiple copies can advantageously be used for simultaneous testing. To get started, all a student needs to know are the hooting prompt "TEST" and how to insert the disk in a drive. For an averaee-leneth examination, a microcomputer requires only seconds io select the individual items randomly from the sub-hank. Once the first question is displayed, the time for completion of the exam depends mainly on how fast the student supplies the answers. After each response, the correct answer and the sums of the number correct and incorrect are displayed. The session ends with a performance summary and an optional entry in the computer or paper grade hook. Suhsequent repeat-examinations using the same disk may he taken as long as appropriate supervision can he supplied. When it was first announced to the general chemistry class, our students warmly welcomed this form of testing. One examination has been administered as an optional make-up for an in-class test. Most students were eager to try out the system because of its repeatability and flexible scheduling. A total of 68 individual test sessions were completed over a period of two weeks on three microcomputers. The result was that 33 out of 53 students achieved a better score than on the original examination. Other tests have heen generated for the purpose of voluntary review before taking the standardized ACS exam. These have been in heavy demand by seemingly motivated and enthusiastic learners. Many students have reported that their learning of chemistry has been significantly enhanced -
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
