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James Hillenbrand Spring term 1/5/2014
SPPA 2060: Hearing Science
I. Texts
Required:
(1) Deutsch and Richards (D&R), Elementary Hearing Science (This is not in the
bookstore. We’ll talk about how you can get the text in class.)
(2) Online: Chapters from Hillenbrand, Principles of Speech and
Hearing Science (Download from: http://homepages.wmich.edu/~hillenbr/206.html)
II. Grading
Your grade for the course will be based on three exams and at least one quiz:
Exam 1 (28%)
Exam 2 (28%)
Exam 3 (38.0%)
Quiz (6.0%)
Exams will be a combination of short answer, short essay, multiple choice, and making and/or labeling drawings. The dates for exams 1 and 2 will be announced at least a week in advance. The final exam will be comprehensive, but with greater emphasis on the new material since exam 2. The date for the final is published in the schedule of classes. There may be additional quizzes, in which case adjustments will have to be made to the weighting scheme above. Dates for exams and quizzes will be announced a week in advance.
How to figure your final grade (assuming no other quizzes are added): (exam1 x 0.28) + (exam2 x 0.28) + (exam3 x 0.38) + (quiz x 0.06). Example: exam1=90, exam2=88, exam3=93, quiz=80. Final grade = (90 x 0.28) + (88 x 0.28) + (93 x 0.28) + (80 x 0.06) = 25.2+24.64+35.34+4.8 = 89.98 » 90.
Assignment of letter grades to scores will occur using something fairly close to the scheme shown below. Adjustments might be made to this scheme depending on the exact distribution of grades in the class.
93–100: A
88- 92: BA
83- 87: B
80 -82: CB
70-79: C
65 -69: D
below 65: E
Assignments. There may be a small number of homework assignments that are graded pass/fail. Failure to turn these assignments in (and on time) will result in a two-point deduction from your final grade. If there is something wrong with your assignment you will be given one chance to fix the problem(s) and resubmit no later than one week from the original due date.
III. Attendance
I will not take attendance unless there appears to be a widespread problem. However, experience has shown that even fairly minor attendance problems can sometimes create major problems in this course. This seems to be especially true of the material that is covered in the first third of the course. Unless there is a scheduled exam, you do not need to call or email me if you are unable to make a particular class meeting. However, if you have something going on affecting more than one class meeting (health problems, family issues, etc.) please do let me know. Use your own judgment about weather and driving conditions, regardless of whether the University is officially closed. You are way better off missing a class than getting into a car wreck.
IV. Office
CHHS 4468, 387-8066
Office Hours: T,Th 1:45-3:00, or by appointment. Please let me know (phone or email) if
you’re planning to see me during office hours. Note: I get very few visitors
during office hours, so I do not necessarily hold that time open if I have other obligations. But let me know you’re coming and I’ll be there.
Homepage: homepages.wmich.edu/~hillenbr
2060 page: http://homepages.wmich.edu/~hillenbr/206.html
Email: Note: I’m happy to answer questions sent by email if the question can be answered in a sentence or two. If the answer requires an essay I’ll ask you to stop by my office.
V. Advice
Most of you will not find this to be an unusually difficult course. Over the years, the average final grade in this course has generally been around the mid-80s, with most students receiving either an A or a B. However, experience has shown that there is an important minority of students who will have some trouble. There are several straightforward things that you can do to avoid trouble.
1. Pay attention in class and take good notes. This sounds like a very simple thing because it is, but a fair number of students do not do it. This is the single most important thing you can do. When you leave the lecture hall you should have a decent understanding of most of the material that has been taught. This is far more valuable than spending long hours preparing for exams. The importance of this simple idea is illustrated by an experiment that I unintentionally carried out a little while ago.
The parable of the vestibular system. To illustrate how important this point is, I’ll describe the most important accidental experiment of my career. This happened a few years ago in this course. We had an exam coming up and I was taking questions about the exam. The last topic we had covered was a short lecture on the vestibular system, and I was asked if that material would be on the exam. Ordinarily this material is included, but we had covered quite a bit of material since the previous exam, so I made a last-minute decision to save the vestibular system material for the next exam. However, I accidentally printed off a version of the exam with six questions (12 points) about the vestibular system. It was not until the end of the exam session that a student pointed this out to me. So, I did the obvious thing and announced that I would not count the vestibular system questions that should not have been on the exam. (Important Note: None of these questions were difficult. I only spend about 40 minutes on this topic, and the six questions that should not have been there covered only the basics.) So far, all we have is a story about a teacher who is a jelly brain, which is not newsworthy. But here’s the revealing part of the story. I graded the vestibular system questions, though I did not include them when calculating exam scores. But now, for each student, I had a score for the vestibular system questions and a separate score – the real one – based on everything except the vestibular-system questions. What I thought I noticed was that students who did well on the vestibular system questions seemed to be doing well on the remainder of the exam. I checked this in a simple way: I sorted the scores based on performance on the vestibular system questions, then split the class into a top half and a bottom half based only on the vestibular-system scores. The average exam score (with the vestibular questions tossed out) for students in the top half was a 91, and the average for the bottom half was a 74. These two averages are night and day, and there is only one way to explain the difference. The students with the average of 91 did not know the vestibular system material because they had studied it. No one had studied that material. So how did they know this material so well? Easy: these students must have learned the concepts right then and there on the day this material was discussed in class, and/or they learned it from the readings (almost certainly some of both). More importantly, since they did so well on the remainder of the exam, they must take this learn-concepts-as-they-are-taught approach to everything. On the other hand, students in the bottom half, whether they are consciously aware of it or not (and my guess is that usually they are not), must tend to let things slide, forcing them to rely heavily on long hours of study prior to exams; i.e., cramming. This accidental experiment shows very clearly that the cramming strategy does not work well. It also shows that learning things as they are taught, rather than a great fury of studying in the last few days before an exam, is not only far more effective, it is the lazy way to do things. Students who keep up with things put much less time into their school work than crammers do. When exam time rolls around, slow-and-steady students do not have all the much to do. So, there you have it. Take the lazy way out and learn things as they are taught.
2. Don't miss class, especially in the beginning of the course. If you have to miss class for some reason, study the notes from a student or students whose work habits you trust. (This will not necessarily be your best buddy.)
3. The material is quite learnable. If you get it into your head early on that this stuff is too technical and too weird and you can't learn it, you are pretty well guaranteed to have trouble.
4. Keep up with things. If you wait until a day or two before the exam to study, it can sometimes be very difficult to put things together. Paying attention in class, taking good notes, keeping up with the readings, and reviewing your notes between classes are the most important things that you can do. A modest amount of time invested in these ways is far more important than many hours of cramming for exams. If your find yourself putting in long hours preparing for exams it’s pretty well guaranteed that you are not keeping up well enough. This is true of all your classes, in my opinion.
5. Waves and graphs. An item on our course evaluations asks the student for an opinion about the least valuable aspect of the course. Some years ago a student gave this three-word response: “Waves and graphs.” I found this very discouraging. Your goal in this course is to understand the fundamentals of the ear and that part of the nervous system that processes sound. This cannot be done without understanding some basic principles of acoustics. I try very hard to teach these concepts with as little technical detail as possible, but these ideas cannot be understood without understanding the meaning of a small number of very important graphs. For example, the first one that will be introduced is a sound wave, which is a graph that shows how air pressure changes over time. It is extremely important that you learn, as quickly as possible, (a) what is on the horizontal axis (for a sound wave, it is time) and what is on the vertical axis (for a sound wave, it is instantaneous air pressure), and (b) what that graph tells you about the sound that this graph describes. The main point I am trying to make here is that your life will be far easier if you learn (once again, as soon as possible) what these graphs are all about; i.e., what the axis labels are, and what the graph is telling you about the sound that is being described. The good news is that you will only need to learn a small number of these basic types of graphs. But without this basic understanding you will be reduced to trying to memorize a bunch of meaningless squiggles.
6. If you have difficulty interpreting these graphs, or with any other aspect of the course, I am available to provide help outside of class and am very willing to spend time with you.
7. Focus on understanding the material. If you understand how sound and the auditory system work, along with the little bit of basic anatomy that we cover, your exam grades will pretty well take care of themselves.
VI. Readings
The readings for each major section of the course are given in the course outline. Note that the outline does not tell you what you should read on the 17th of January, and what to read on the 19th, and so on. You can make decisions on these details on your own. The sequence of topics that are listed in the course outline matches the sequence of topics that are covered in the lectures. I recommend that you read ahead of the lectures rather than behind them. Please download the online material in the 1st week or so. I only have so much disk space on my web page and I remove that material as soon as I can. Last point: I strongly recommend that you actually do the readings. I was surprised to learn a little while ago that a significant number of students are not in the habit of doing the readings. It may be possible to do well in a course without doing the readings, although I doubt that this is common, and I find it hard to believe that this is the easy way to do it.
VII. Final exam date
The date for the final exam is listed in the schedule of classes. It’s also available online. Do a web search for wmu final exam schedule spring 2014 (or whatever the actual year happens to be). I see that there are times listed for 12:00 and 1:00, but not 12:30. I believe that ours is the time listed for 12:00. If that’s wrong I’ll let you know.
VIII. Exam keys: A week or so prior to the final I will leave the keys to exams 1 and 2 with Mrs. Armstrong. Because of some very serious incidents that happened recently (and had probably happened in the past without my knowledge), there will be some restrictions: (1) No more than three students may look over an exam key at one time. We have to avoid the big mobs that we have always had in the few days before the final. This means that you may be out of luck if you leave the job until the last minute. (2) You will not be allowed to take notes. This is very unfortunate because I do not having any problem with students taking a few notes. But I learned recently that quite a few students were copying the entire exam key, along with all of the answers. This is not acceptable. So, you will have to learn the concepts then and there, which might not be such a bad idea in the long run. (5) The keys need to remain within a few feet of Mrs. Armstrong at all times. (6) No cell phones anywhere near the exam keys. The most serious incident I referred to earlier involved a student using a cell phone to photograph two complete exam keys. This is dishonest, unfair to other students, and unacceptable. Leave your backpacks and whatnot with Mrs. Armstrong. Finally, Mrs. Armstrong is usually at her desk, but not always, so if you have a tight timeline you may need to contact her about her schedule ().