The Enlightenment bequeathed to us the notion that the human mind can and should dominate over nature—that there is nothing we cannot know or should not attempt. And, in fact, there is something to be said for this position, since a truthful historian has to admit that standards of living have generally been greatly bettered by the technology of the last two centuries. Without confidence in our ability to remake nature, the great medical advances of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would never have been possible: antisepsis, the discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus, sulfa drugs, the polio vaccine. Like twentieth-century researchers who faced polio and smallpox, Mark Walker has perhaps identified the central ethical malady of our twenty-first century civilization—how the lack of virtue impedes our moral progress. And just as biological researchers sought to use science to eradicate these diseases, so Walker seeks to use genetic manipulation to eradicate evil.
The notion of Socratic Note Taking (SNT) is introduced to enhance students' learning from assigned readings. SNT features students asking questions and answering their own questions while doing the readings. To test the effectiveness of SNT, half the students from two sections of a philosophy course were assigned SNT on alternating weeks. Quizzes each week alternated between the two classes as either high or low stakes in a counterbalanced format. The design was a 2 (Notes: SNT or not) x 2 (Stakes: high or low) x 2 (Replication: first or second replication of a Notes x Stakes cell) within-participants factorial. On 10-point quizzes, SNT made an average difference of 1.22 points (more than a letter grade). In effect size terms that take error variance into account, 𝜂 𝑃 2 = .43. Furthermore, the results indicate that SNT is particularly effective with weaker students, e.g., we found a nearly 3-point increase on 10-point quizzes for the weakest students.
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