by Leslie Johnson
Deborah Starczewski, a child development instructor at Onondaga Community College, promotes the use of reflective journals in the October 2016 issue of The Teaching Professor. She considers them to be “one of the most valuable and least time-consuming assignments” that her students complete.
Starczewski structures the assignment very simply:
- Every other week, she poses a question based on the theories, studies, and classroom activities.
- Students craft a 2-3 paragraph personal response to the question and submit it via their course management system.
- She emphasizes that there is no right or wrong answer but that correct grammar and complete sentences are necessary.
- Journals are private, and the instructor only responds if a student requests feedback.
The most important aspect of Starczewski’s system is that the students don’t lose points if they don’t submit a journal. Instead, 5 points are added to their final grade for each response they submit. In that way, participation is voluntary, but she notes students that still choose to participate and actually tell her how much they enjoyed the assignment. For Starczewski, she not only learns what students are thinking—especially those reluctant to participate in class discussion—she also learns how well they understand and can apply the course material.
Moreover, she explains that while some students are initially resistant to the idea of journaling, many actually enjoy the ability to express their thoughts about what they have learned. “It provides a forum via which students can personally respond without fear of being challenged or ridiculed for their ideas,” Starczewski explains. “If we tell students we are interested in their ideas, thoughts, and viewpoints, then we need to not only listen to those who express them in class but also read the responses of those who write,” Starczewski says.
If you would like to read more classroom ideas, stop by the CTE during open hours and read the current or past issues of The Teaching Professor.
Reference: Starczewski, D.L. (2016). Encouraging students to think beyond the course material: the benefits of using reflective journals. The Teaching Professor, 30(8), 5.
by Leslie Johnson
We know that many students arrive at college with insufficient and ineffective study skills; often they believe that what got them through high school will also get them through college. The October 2016 issue of The Teaching Professor reported how an “authentic” study skills assignment actually helped first-year students improve exam scores.
Students in a first-year experience course were not only taught college-level learning strategies, they were also given an assignment to actually utilize the strategies for an upcoming exam in a course other than the first-year experience. Students created a study game plan that included several parts:
- Meeting with the instructor about the exam.
- Using reading review activities.
- Active note-taking strategies.
- Implementing their choice of appropriate exam study strategies.
- Predicting their grade after taking the exam.
- Reflecting on their preparation and performance after receiving their exam grade.
Study author, H. H. Steiner noted that students need to be provided with such opportunities for “deliberate practice,” actual application of the study skills taught in a way that is meaningful to them. “In order for a person to achieve mastery levels, practice of the skill in an authentic context is necessary,” Steiner writes.
The reflections that the students wrote indicated the effectiveness of an assignment requiring them to use their new study skills. While many were initially reluctant to change their study habits, most students reported an increase in their exam grades. Forty-five percent of the students saw their exam grades improve by one letter grade; another 26 percent saw smaller gains in their grades. The few who reported declines cited “personal circumstances” as interfering with their success. One student even called the project “the most eye opening project of my entire semester.” Importantly, many students noted plans for permanent changes in their exam preparation.
Steiner explained that the project could be easily adapted to any mandatory introductory course students must take or an early course in a major where students need to learn how to study for particular content.
If you would like to read more instructional ideas from the current or past issues of The Teaching Professor, stop by the Center for Teaching Excellence during our open hours. You can even enjoy a cup of coffee or tea while you read!
Reference: Steiner, H.H. (2016). The strategy project: Promoting self-regulated learning through an authentic assignment. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 28(2), 271-282.
by Tim Deines
In discussions of evaluation and assessment of writing and other academic work, feedback is held up as a nearly unimpeachable good. Writing teachers, for example, often use marginal and end comments to heavily supplement, if not replace entirely, traditional grammar correction. As long as the feedback is more or less immediate, we often assume, it is preferable to a grading regime that strictly quantifies the final product.
And yet, the translation from feedback to grade can be a difficult one for both student and teacher. As teachers, we’re often not sure if students read and practice the suggestions we make. We might imagine that a valuable exchange of insight and information is happening – especially in online environments – where none actually is.
From the student point of view, if the student reads feedback, there may be a lack of understanding about how the feedback relates to the grade. Rubrics are one way of confronting this potential disconnect, but that sometimes just introduces one more variable into a messy, vague calculation.
Part of the problem is that today we tend to want to quantify everything that happens in the academy. But everyone knows that writing, for example, is not easily reducible to impersonal, objective numbers.
In the April edition of “The Teaching Professor,” Cassandra O’Sullivan Sachar discusses all of these issues in a piece called “Making Feedback Matter.” Sachar offers three bits of information that may help writing teachers and others better manage the relationship between feedback and grades
Sachar’s first piece of advice is “separate the grade from the feedback.” The main reason to do this is to remove the stigma of the grade from the writer’s self-perception as a person capable of doing that work. “Many students hold negative perceptions of themselves as writers,” Sachar says. “Removing the threat of bad grades can build confidence and motivate students to complete the assignment” (1). Sachar has found that students respond more positively and productively to feedback when the grade is removed from the assessment criteria. For most of us, this approach cannot be applied to the course as a whole, but there may be wiggle-room inside a course to experiment.
Sachar also recommends assigning grades “based on student effort and improvement.” The point here is to emphasize writing and thinking processes while placing less weight on the final product, as important as that may be. “I want them to think,” explains Sachar, “not just about the quality of the final product, but the journey to get there.” In this way, feedback is attached to process and product, as opposed to some ideal result students feel may never be attained.
Finally, Sachar suggests requiring a quick follow-up assignment based on the feedback. This can take any number of forms, and should not be a major undertaking. When students are asked to put the feedback to work in their writing right away, it follows that they will take much more intrinsic interest in the feedback.
Sachar does us the great service of taking feedback seriously. If we are to rely on such a method in the academy – in writing courses, certainly, but also across the curriculum – it would be a good idea to understand the limits of its effectiveness.
The Teaching Professor includes summarized articles from various educational publications, as well as original articles from university and college instructors. If you are interested in viewing articles in this and/or other publications, contact Tim Deines at deinest@star.lcc.edu or stop by the CTE, TLC 324.
Reference: Sachar, Cassandra O. “Making Feedback Matter.” The Teaching Professor 30.4 (2016): 1. Print.
Recently while driving around town I heard on the radio an interview with the classicist Mary Beard. In the interview she talked about her now 10-year-old blog, A Don’s Life. It sounded interesting, so I checked it out.
Turns out that Beard writes on all kinds of subjects in A Don’s Life, not only or even primarily on ancient Western topics. She tackles the Cecil Rhodes controversy at Oxford, for instance, how we handle disagreement today, her vacation to Iceland, and more, ten years more. Some of it I liked!
The more I browsed, the more it came home to me how important it is that academics remain interested in the world beyond our limited disciplines. It may even be that our intellectual peregrinations are crucial to our continued disciplinary relevance.
This is part of Pamela Reese’s underlying point in “The Classic Movies Come to Class” in the January edition of The Teaching Professor. Reese wants all of us, in every discipline, to work ‘classic’ movies into our curriculum. By experiencing such films, according to Reese, students “can have thrilling revelations that bridge directly to what they are studying.” By a slight change of focus and medium, the desired learning objective can be attained. Reese provides a nice list of films to consider, too!
By reminding us that our disciplines exist in broader contexts and relations, Beard and Reese encourage us to bring all of our intellectual interests and creativity to bear on our teaching.
The Teaching Professor includes summarized articles from various educational publications, as well as original articles from university and college instructors. If you are interested in viewing articles in this and/or other publications, contact Tim Deines at deinest@star.lcc.edu or stop by the CTE, TLC 324.
by guest blogger Tim Deines
Regardless of discipline, faculty are increasingly interested in getting students to write. In a recent issue of The Teaching Professor, “Learning Logs” reminds us that teachers understand the intellectual value in ‘writing across the curriculum’.
But even when educators support writing in their discipline, they might not know what to assign. What does writing look like, for example, in an intermediate calculus class?
That’s where the practice of learning logs comes in.
A learning log is one of any number of flexible writing assignments that enables students to approach their academic discipline from a ‘writerly’ point-of-view.
Learning logs can change depending on what the learning objective of the assignment is. For example, perhaps a physics teacher thinks that if students explore their emotional responses to the latest chapter in quantum theory they will digest the ideas better. An appropriate learning log could then ask students to free-write about how they feel as they work through this particular part of the course content. This could be a low-stakes writing assignment with little or no grade attached to it.
October's The Teaching Professor has many more examples of learning log activities that teachers can use in their classrooms. Visit the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) to check out a copy!
Reference: “Learning Logs” (2015) The Teaching Professor, 29.8 (October), 6.
by guest blogger Tim Deines
A recent article in The
Teaching Professor suggests that collaborative learning can be an
effective pedagogical strategy. Drawing on the work of Giuliodori, et
al, the article, “Getting to the Right Answer in Collaborative Testing,”
affirms that collaborative learning has always been at the heart of
scientific advancement. “Why then,” ask researchers, “do we discourage
collaboration by telling our students to ‘keep your eyes on your own
paper’” (qtd. in “Getting to the Right Answer” 2)?
Still,
faculty worry about how collaborative testing and learning affect
student testing performance. What is the relative impact of
well-performing and poorly-performing students on the collaborating
group, for example? Faculty may ask, “Are the smart students making the
decision for the rest of the group” (“Getting to the Right Answer” 2)?
Giuliodori’s
research, which sampled the individual and group testing behavior of 65
vet students, found that having the right answer was more important
than being a “high-performing” student. Students of all performance
levels were usually able to convince fellow students through discussion
that their answers were the correct ones.
This data
challenges the assumption that we learn best on our own. Giuliodori’s
findings suggest that there may be a need for a pedagogical paradigm
shift in how we teach and test.
Stop by the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) to read the entire article!
Reference: “Getting to the Right Answer in Collaborative Testing” (2015) The Teaching Professor, 29.8 (October), 2-5.
The
Teaching Professor includes summarized articles from various
educational publications, as well as original articles from university
and college instructors. If you are interested in reviewing articles in
this and/or other publications, please stop by the CTE, TLC 324, where
you can read in a comfortable setting and enjoy a complimentary cup of
coffee, tea, or hot chocolate.
Continuous and Rapid Test (CaRT): A Simple Tool for Assessment and Communication
In
this article, the authors discuss a technique, CaRT, to assess student
understanding of course material in almost every class session.
Instructors give each student a 3x5 card as they enter class and
instruct them to answer the 2 or 3 questions on the overhead/board.
These questions pertain to material covered in the preceding class. On
the back of the card, students may include any concepts or material that
they feel are difficult or confusing. After collecting the cards, the
instructor reveals the correct answers to the questions.
Before the
next class, the instructor reviews all of the cards taking note of how
well students were able to answer the questions, and how well each
student was able to understand recently covered material. If only one or
two students appear to have some difficulty, the CaRT process allows
instructors to either review material with the entire class or to invite
those one or two students to review the material during office hours.
“CaRT can help teachers feel the ‘pulse’ and progress of the class on a
day-to-day basis and help in monitoring attendance. It encourages
students to come to class prepared and reduces procrastination.”
Reference:
Dam, Tarun K., and Purnima Bandyopadhyay. "Continuous and Rapid Test (CaRT):
A Simple Tool for Assessment and Communication." The Teaching Professor
Aug/Sept. 2015: 1. Print.
The Teaching Professor includes summarized articles from various educational publications, as well as original articles from university and college instructors. If you are interested in reviewing articles in this and/or other publications, please stop by the CTE, TLC 324, where you can read in a comfortable setting and enjoy a complimentary cup of coffee, tea, or hot chocolate.
Inside the June/July 2015 issue of The Teaching Professor, you will find the following articles:
Flipped Exam Boosts Student Learning
Flipping the exam is the focus of “Flipped Exam Boosts Student Learning,” a summary piece based on research done by H.L. Lujanm and S.E. DiCarlo at Wayne State University. The researchers decided to grade students based on their collaborative efforts in answering exam questions. They asked students to answer 45 exam questions of which “30-35% of the material had not been talked about in class.” Students were given a set amount of time to collectively arrive at the answer for each exam question. In the next class period, instructors walked through the exam with students, asking them to explain their answers and challenging them to find the correct answer when one was incorrect. “In this way, students explored why answers were correct as well as incorrect while understanding principles and concepts.” Overall, the researchers feel that this method of testing promotes greater learning and more importantly, understanding of complex answers beyond the typical surface response.
Teaching Students the Importance of Professionalism
In the article “Teaching Students the Importance of Professionalism”, author Angela Keaton, an instructor at Tusculum College, observes that the majority of her students lack any sense of professionalism as they prepare to enter the professional workforce. She lists eight professional values that students are held to during the term: honesty, integrity, respect, humility, compassion, an awareness of interpersonal boundaries, expertise, and a commitment to excellence. She provides students with a list of poor behaviors associated with each of these values, such as turning in work late, arriving late, interrupting others, texting during class. She grades students on their class professionalism, which she explains to them on the first day of class. At the beginning of the term, each student is given 100 points. Students lose points for each unprofessional behavior they exhibit throughout the term. She reserves 10-15% of the final grade for their professionalism in her class.
References:
“Flipped Exam Boosts Student Learning.” The Teaching Professor 6 July 2015: 6. Print.
Keaton, Angela F. “Teaching Students the Importance of Professionalism.” The Teaching Professor 29.6 (2015): 5. Print.
