Helping Students to Succeed

by Dr. Sue Pieper, Coordinator of Assessment

With more students struggling academically, particularly in the first year, and fewer students persisting to graduation, many of us in higher education are asking how we can help our students to succeed. One way is to teach students to “think about their thinking.” In other words, we can teach them to develop metacognitive skills that will help them to become aware of their own thinking processes and use that self-awareness to regulate those processes. Researchers and practitioners agree that metacognition is critical to academic success.

In a previous blog post, I promised to provide some easy-to-implement strategies for teaching metacognition in face-to-face and online courses. When I reviewed the research and talked to colleagues about what they were doing to promote metacognition in their classes, a theme emerged: The best way to teach metacognition is to do it in conjunction with activities and assignments that are already a part of your class. Here are some strategies for teaching your students to think about their thinking when they take exams, listen to lectures, or work on writing assignments in your class.

Taking Exams

College students are often unaware of what they know and don’t know (Zabrucky and Bays, 2011). When taking exams, students frequently overestimate their level of understanding and readiness to take a test. First-year students in particular report that “looking over their notes” before an exam has worked well for them in the past (Ruban and Reis, 2006), and they are shocked when they receive exam scores that are lower than expected.

Karen Zabrucky and Rebecca Bays suggest that we can help students better understand what they know and don’t know by asking them to predict their exam scores right before they take an exam and then also estimate their scores right after taking an exam but before receiving their grades. Students can then compare their predictions and estimates with their actual exam scores. The authors also suggest that instructors ask students questions about how they studied for an exam and whether they felt they were adequately prepared to take the exam. These questions prompt students to reflect on both their level of preparation for an exam and the consequences of their level of preparation.

Listening to Lectures

Shawn Nordell (2009) conducted research with students in a large introductory biology course and found that most students had difficulty recalling course knowledge. When students were asked to write down two or three of the main points discussed in a lecture and readings, most students had no response at all or could remember only a key word or phrase.

Marsha Lovett (2008) described a technique called “wrappers,” activities that wrap around a learning activity or assignment and can be used to foster students’ metacognitive skills, including the recall of course knowledge. Instructors can “wrap” a lecture by presenting tips on active listening before the lecture, having students write down the three key ideas from the lecture immediately after the lecture, and then giving students a list of the three key ideas from the lecture for students to self-check. Lovett found that over time the students’ three key ideas increasingly matched those of the instructor.

Working on Writing Assignments

One way to prompt students to reflect on their writing is to provide them with questions for self-assessment. Before students begin to write, ask them to answer questions such as “What are my goals for this writing assignment?” or “What do I need to do to prepare to write?” You can also ask students to answer questions right after they write. Here are some suggested questions, adapted from a questionnaire used in a large-scale university writing assessment at Truman State University:

• How do you feel about your finished writing sample?
• How representative is this sample of your writing?
• Describe your writing process.
• What do you feel is especially strong about your writing sample?
• What do you feel could be improved in your writing sample?

The Writing Place at Northwestern University offers good examples of self-assessment questions and a worksheet for students to use when evaluating their own writing.

All of these strategies help students to practice their metacognitive skills and grow as learners. Have you tried any of these strategies in your online or face-to-face class? What worked, and what didn’t work? What other methods have you used to encourage students to think about their thinking? Please comment on your experiences with teaching your students how to learn.

References

Lovett, M. C. (2008, May 5). EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Events. Retrieved May 18, 2008, from Metacognition and Monitoring: Understanding and Improving Students’ Skills for Learning.

Nordell, S. E. (2009). Learning how to learn: A model for teaching students learning strategies. Bioscene: Journal of College Biology Teaching, 35 – 42.

Ruban, L., & Reis, S. M. (2006). “Patterns of Self-Regulation: Patterns of Self-Regulatory Strategy Use among Low-Achieving and High-Achieving University Students. Roeper Review, 148 – 156.

Zabrucky, K. M., & Bays, R. (2011). Helping students know what they know and do not know. College Teaching, 123.

Rethinking Your Course with Student Learning in Mind

by Dr. Sue Pieper, Coordinator of Assessment

It’s official! During this year, Northern Arizona University will be moving to a new learning management system, Blackboard Learn. As you move your courses to the new system or use the new system for the first time, take advantage of the opportunity to rethink your courses, adjusting them as needed to incorporate a learner-centered approach in line with the university’s values.

Effective learner-centered courses are distinguished by five characteristics outlined by Maryellen Weimer in Learner-Centered Teaching: Five Key Changes to Practice (2002). According to Weimer, who also edits The Teaching Professor,  the following course elements change when teaching becomes learner-centered:

• The balance of power
• The function of content
• The role of the teacher
• The responsibility for learning
• The purposes and processes of evaluation

In a learner-centered course power is shared among teachers and students, resulting in a more engaging and motivating course environment. Content in a learner-centered course is used to promote students’ knowledge as well as their learning how to learn. The role of the teacher is to guide and facilitate student learning, with the students assuming the primary responsibility for learning. The purpose of evaluation includes not only grading, but also fostering improved student learning (Weimer, 2002).

Let’s consider some ways you can incorporate learner-centered teaching in your
own courses.

The Syllabus Quiz

The syllabus is an essential part of every course, providing information about learning outcomes, required textbooks and materials, a course calendar, and student and instructor responsibilities. We ask students to read the syllabus at the beginning of a course. Then we typically spend class time reviewing the syllabus, or we spend time answering multiple questions because students haven’t read the syllabus.

An alternative approach is to require students to pass a syllabus quiz, which can be set up as a brief true/false or multiple-choice online quiz that can be graded automatically by the learning management system. Many instructors have found that using a syllabus quiz as a “gateway” is effective. Students must pass the quiz with an acceptable score in order to gain access to the rest of the course. As a result, responsibility for reading and understanding the syllabus is placed on the students, not the teacher.

Self- and Peer-Evaluation of Group Work

Group work can be challenging in a face-to-face course, and effective group work is even more challenging in an online environment when instructors and students are at a distance.

If you want to improve group work in your course, consider involving students in not only completing the group assignments, but also in evaluating how they function as a group. First, teach them about the dynamics of group work and the various roles in a group. Then teach them how to assess their participation in their groups.

Rubrics — documents that describe an instructor’s grading criteria and levels of performance expected from students for each grade possible in an assignment — are very helpful for both instructors and students in assessing group work. An example of a team and leadership skills rubric, which assesses criteria such as group organization and coordination, is available from the e-Learning Center’s website.

When you create a rubric and share it with your students, you enable them to take responsibility for evaluating their own and their group members’ contributions to the group. Consequently, students learn content while also developing an awareness of how they work with others.

Student-Designed Exam Questions

Designing exams has traditionally been the purview of instructors, but what if we ask students to design an exam? Weimer offers examples, including a math instructor’s experience with giving students an end-of-the-course option to develop a final exam. She evaluated the assignment on criteria such as how well the exam questions corresponded with the intended student learning outcomes for the course, the solutions for the problems, and the point values assigned to the problems, taking into account their relative importance in the course content. The students told the instructor that they spent more time designing the exam than they would have spent studying for it.

Involving students in constructing exams and other course evaluations transforms the goal of assessment from just obtaining a grade to promoting student learning and development. Especially in an online environment, where students can sometimes feel isolated, designing exams, particularly as a group, can be an engaging and empowering course assignment.

Assess Your Courses

Are you incorporating learner-centered outcomes, assignments, and assessments? Are students assuming the primary responsibility for learning? Are you taking the role of guide and facilitator? If you think you could make some course improvements in these areas, try one of the ideas described here. For assistance in changing to a learner-centered approach or choosing the best learning management tools to accomplish your goals, contact us at the e-Learning Center. We’re here to help!

Pedagogy and the iPad

by John J. Doherty and Kevin Ketchner

Perhaps the hardest part of owning an iPad is trying to avoid the addictive world of Angry Birds, the favorite game app of the new British Prime Minister. For just $5 you, too, can attack pigs with hard-headed flying birds.

That kind of distraction is exactly what many faculty worry about when we ponder the place of tools such as the iPad in the classroom. We fear that our students will be more engaged with their games or Twitter feeds than with our lectures. But the iPad, the iPhone, the Droid, and the flood of other new tablets and smart phones finding their way into our classrooms are not the cause of student inattention. These gadgets are just tools, and student engagement depends on good teaching whether or not a cool gadget is present. In Technological and Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge (.pdf), Punya Mishra and Matthew J. Koehler note that we need to understand not only various technologies but also how the technologies affect our pedagogy.

The iPad is a good case in point. Since the iPad’s launch in April 2010 some educators have begun to examine its place in education. Our experience in using the iPad for teaching is that it is useful in two distinct ways, consumption and production, although it currently is more useful for the former than the latter.

Consumption

The iPad is very obviously a tool for consuming information and media. Reading publications such as the New York Times or watching movies through the Netflix app seems to be a natural fit for the device. In the classroom, we have been using iPads as a way to deliver information to our students.

For example, in a course on Reinventing King Arthur, John used the Kindle app on his iPad to give his students access to some of the course readings. In fact, he chose the course readings based on their availability in ebook format, and in one instance, John was able to bring back into his course a text that had been out of print for almost 20 years! In another case, students who chose to download the Kindle version of a new book were able to do so several days before others were able to order the printed version (although this might have been an error on Amazon’s part). The students used their own devices, mobile or otherwise, to read the ebooks, which was possible because the Kindle app is no longer limited to the Kindle device. The app can be used on PCs or Macs, desktops or laptops, iPads, iPhones, Droids, and iPod Touches. One of its best features is that you can read the same book on various devices, and the app will remember where you left off. You can start reading a book on your laptop and then later switch to reading on your phone without losing your place.

Kevin has been using the iPad for an Honors course on the cultural impact of comic books. Marvel, DC, and other publishers have iPad apps (iTunes link) that present comics in sharp, HD-like quality. When you can zoom in on details of comics in high definition, the panels take on an immersive quality.

The following panel is a screen capture of the Iron Man (2004) #1 book, available in the Marvel app.

Students in the course can download the movies Iron Man (2008) and V for Vendetta (2006) via the iTunes Store or other media sources. By examining both the comic serial and the movie versions of these stories, students see how the superhero movie genre has reinvented the comic.

Students can also use reference apps such as Wikipanion (Wikipedia) to find out details about characters in these stories (such as Guy Fawkes, the original fundamentalist terrorist who is burned in effigy in the UK every November 5th).

The ebooks John uses in his course include built-in dictionaries that make it convenient for students to look up unusual words, which is invaluable for texts based on older versions of the English language. The iPad apps can also read the texts aloud.

Here are some other apps that we’ve experimented with and have found useful for teaching.

App	Description
iAnnotate PDF ($9.99)	Syncs PDF documents between your desktop and your iPad. It also lets you highlight and underline and add commentary, which is great for our e-reserve readings.
CineXPlayer ($3.99)	Delivers Xvid movies to the iPad through iTunes. Includes subtitles and TV/VGA output. The advantage to this app is that it supports more than just iTunes native formats.
Netflix (Free)	The app is free, but you need a Netflix subscription to use it. You get access to the Netflix streaming library. John has had his students view the BBC TV series Merlin (2008) and the movies Camelot (1967) and Excalibur (1981).

Accessibility

The iPad is opening doors for some differently abled users. Its built-in text reader can give voice to anything downloaded to iBooks. Dragon Dictation is a free iPad app that uses voice recognition to create text email messages and even Facebook and Twitter updates. The iPad’s magnification and closed-captioning features also make content available for a wide range of people. The New York Times recently reported on how an iPad elicited reactions from a 7-year-old boy who has a severe motor neuron disease. The same article noted that autistic children are also engaging more with this tool than a regular computer.

Production

As a production tool—that is, for generating rather than just consuming content—the iPad has plenty of potential, but it still has lots of room for improvement. Much of this post was written in the Pages app on the iPad, using the on-screen keyboard. Or at least it was until we started getting annoyed when we typed too many extra n‘s and m‘s because those keys are uncomfortably close to the space bar for our not-so-nimble digits. So we just synced the iPads to our desktops and continued typing from there, using real keyboards.

The on-screen keyboard works well enough for some things: browsing the web, searching the App Store, typing things into Wikipedia. In our opinion, though, an external keyboard is an essential add-on if you want to use the iPad for serious writing.

In addition to Pages, the other two iWork apps—Numbers and Keynote— for the iPad are useful production tools . Each costs $9.99 from the iTunes Store. iWork will soon be available to the NAU campus through a site license, and it is a decent alternative to the MS Office applications. John developed some of his course documentation in Pages and Numbers.

Drawbacks

Some of the drawbacks to using these apps include lack of easy cloud syncing and inability to print directly from the iPad. That said, the MobileMe iDisk app does provide some access to the MobileMe cloud (which requires a subscription) or the beta of iWork.com. There are rumors of an about-to-be-released Google Apps app for the iPad and Android that will allow for editing of Google docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Apple is undoubtedly working on updates to their products to fix these and other shortcomings, and they are also exploring cloud-based computing, but if you want to take the iPad plunge now, you should be aware of these limitations. Syncing the iPad to your computer also leaves a lot to be desired, because you need to go through iTunes to make it work at all. The advantages of using the iPad over a netbook as a mobile production tool are currently few.

Recently, we discovered two note-taking apps for the iPad that let you use your finger or a stylus. We tested Penultimate and WhiteNote in meetings and in the classroom. The former is pretty slick but simple. The latter needs some work, especially in how it uses the screen and the writing space. But it offers the bonus of letting you browse and import from the web, PDFs, and other formats, and it also uses cloud-based resources for saving and sharing PDFs via Google Docs.

The iPad and some smart phones are beginning to offer access to learning management systems (LMS), such as Blackboard Learn and Moodle. Mobile apps are available for both of these LMS, but their functionality is quite limited, although the Blackboard Mobile Learn app syndicates content from that LMS quite well. For the moment, though, both Blackboard Learn and Moodle are best accessed on the iPad through a browser.

Lessons Learned and In Progress

The iPad holds much promise for education, but it is still in its infancy. Missing but available soon with the impending release of iOS 4.2 release are the ability to multitask (that is, to run more than one app at a time), print from the iPad, and even output information to other devices through AirPlay. The ability to easily display the content of your iPad on an overhead projector is essential for educators, and we hope Apple addresses that shortcoming quickly. Apple’s prohibition of Adobe’s Flash on the iPad means that some of our preferred media sources, such as streaming films available through our university library, are not viewable on the device. However, the Skyfire browser, which converts Flash video to a format that works on Apple’s mobile devices, might soon solve that problem.

The most obvious lesson we learned is that students like using the iPads for classes. It wasn’t at all hard to get the students to use the iPads. It was hard to get the students to give them back.

---

John J. Doherty is an instructional designer at Northern Arizona University’s e-Learning Center and an instructor in NAU’s First Year Seminar and Honors programs. He has been studying the Arthurian Legend formally since 1989, but has been reading and writing about it much longer. Kevin Ketchner is a librarian with NAU’s Cline Library and also teaches in Honors. His love of comic books has generated a strong interest in visual literacy and narrative.

 

Blended Learning: It’s Coming Our Way

by Sue Pieper
Coordinator for Assessment, e-Learning Center at Northern Arizona University

You’ve probably heard about it. You might even be engaged in it right now.  It goes by many names, including hybrid and mixed-mode learning. It’s blended learning, and it’s coming our way.

I came to this conclusion after attending a recent two-day EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative webinar, Blended Learning: The 21st Century Learning Environment. Blended learning is a complex mix of face-to-face and online elements in a single course. After learning about and reflecting on the latest theory and research on blended learning, quality considerations, design and implementation issues, and practical applications, I came away with a few ideas.

Thoughtful design can promote student learning

I learned that blended learning, if designed thoughtfully, can promote student learning. As one webinar participant put it, “intentionality,” is necessary for the success of a blended learning course. Obviously, thoughtfulness or intentionality is important in designing any course, but it may be paramount in designing a blended course. Combining components of face-to-face and online teaching can be challenging, even for instructors who are experienced at teaching in both modes. So what does an instructor need to think about when designing a blended course?

This question is addressed in Ten Questions to Consider when Redesigning a Course for Hybrid Teaching and Learning. One question is particularly important:

As you think about learning objectives, which would be better achieved online and which would be best achieved face-to-face?

This question asks instructors to think carefully about how they and their students can best use their time in class and online.

Rethinking class time

Gerald Bergtrom

A striking example of rethinking teaching, learning, and time was provided by webinar presenter Gerald Bergtrom at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Bergtrom described how he transformed his face-to-face biology course to a blended learning course that provided content coverage and promoted student learning at the same time. In his original face-to-face course, he devoted all of his class time to lectures and in-class exams. In the blended course, he eliminated all lectures in the face-to-face meetings and replaced them with critical thinking and interactive exercises: muddiest point writings, clicker questions, and small group index card activities. Content was delivered online through a variety of modes, including text readings, PowerPoint lectures, discussions, papers, and quizzes. In this way, Bergtrom integrated and mutually reinforced face-to-face and online activities. Bergtrom found that, although creating a blended course required effort, he enjoyed teaching more and his students learned better in the new blended course.

The idea of rethinking how time in class and online can enhance student learning was also discussed in episodes #26 and #27 of Tuesday Tips on Teaching with Technology (iTunes U link), a podcast series produced by Northern Arizona University’s e-Learning Center. Wally Nolan and John Doherty explained how offering online learning activities before and after class and linking them to in-class activities can improve instructor and student productivity. They described a common instructor experience: students arriving in class without having read the assigned readings. To address that problem before class, instructors can have students complete an online quiz on the readings. During class, instructors can then devote their time to clarifying and enhancing student learning through discussion. After class, students can extend their in-class conversations through an online discussion or an activity that lets them apply what has been learned.

You can find other examples of effective blended learning designs in Blended Learning in Higher Education, written by two other webinar presenters, Randy Garrison at the University of Calgary and Norman Vaughan at Mount Royal University. Garrison and Vaughn organize their examples around three scenarios common to higher education: small class courses, large enrollment courses, and project-based courses. Each scenario has its own challenges that can be addressed through different blended learning designs.

Your thoughts?

What is your experience with blended learning? If you have taught a blended course, what has and hasn’t worked?  If you haven’t taught a blended course, what do you think will be important to consider in course design? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

College Is for Everyone, So Attendance Is Mandatory!

by Larry MacPhee

Amidst the flurry of bad press over SB 1070 (.pdf) and the resulting boycott of Arizona, you might have missed something interesting on page two. NAU made the Chronicle, and Slashdot picked up the story. It has been spun as a privacy and digital rights story, but it’s really something much bigger. It seems there’s a plan in the works here at NAU to use student ID cards with embedded RFID (radio frequency identification) chips to record class attendance. We’ve been using clickers to do this for years. So why are university administrators increasingly interested in mandatory attendance? The answer is complex, but it has a lot to do with a societal shift that is having ripple effects in academia. Michael Wesch says it this way: College is for learning, and learning is for everyone. So college is for everyone. It wasn’t always this way.

A college education used to be something one aspired to, but it certainly wasn’t a necessity. For many students today, going to college no longer feels like a choice. The bachelor’s degree is the modern-day equivalent of the 1950 high school diploma. Students increasingly resent the liberal studies courses that teach “critical thinking” but don’t give them the tangible workplace skills they think they need. Given the number of times a modern worker changes careers, critical thinking, the ability to write, and other versatile competencies are more important than ever, but we haven’t done a good job selling that argument. Many students now see college simply as an expensive and time-consuming obstacle that must be overcome on the path to a good-paying job. Knowledge for its own sake is no longer the primary motivator. As Ronald Reagan once said, echoing the growing public sentiment, “Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?” So while the public is less interested in a classical education, demand for diplomas is at an all-time high. But universities are slow to change and haven’t really adjusted what is taught or how it’s taught. As a result, universities are admitting more students who are unprepared for—and less interested in—acquiring that classical education. Can you see now why mandatory attendance is becoming an issue?

Retention, High Standards, Relevance, and Choice

Administrators want to give students—including those who are unmotivated and unprepared—more opportunities to succeed, which keeps tuition dollars flowing in, so they sometimes focus on reducing the D/F/W (drop, fail, and withdraw) rates. Faculty sometimes see this as pressure to lower standards, so they push back, blaming K-12 for sending them unprepared students, refusing to teach remedial material, and resisting efforts to change the way they teach. Both groups need to realize that lowering standards and refusing to change won’t solve the problem. Instead, courses need to be redesigned to make them more compelling, practical, and relevant. Otherwise, faculty will be forced to deal with a lot more dissatisfied students who will disrupt the classes in which they don’t think they are getting what they paid for, and the perennial conflicts between administrators and faculty will continue to escalate.

Think back to your own education. What was the biggest difference between high school and college? Students acted out or tuned out in high school classes because they were required to be there and didn’t, for any number of reasons, want to be. Classroom management, a life-and-death skill for K-12 teachers, used to be mostly unnecessary for higher ed instructors. In college, students who didn’t want to be there quickly stopped showing up and, until recently, colleges have been mostly ok with that. The old attitude was that “college isn’t for everyone” and “it’s your money.” We are teaching young adults to take responsibility for their choices, the argument goes. A university is a place for free thinking, and if students choose not to attend class, who are we to tell them otherwise? But retention is the new mantra, and mandatory attendance is seen as one way to enforce it.

Unintended Consequences?

What will be the effects of mandatory attendance on college classes? On the surface, it seems like a good idea. Numerous studies show a strong positive correlation between attendance and student success. Students need to know that attendance matters and that we’re serious about it. But if we dig a bit deeper, there are several problems. In most studies, student success is only strongly correlated with voluntary attendance. If you make attendance mandatory, the effect is considerably, but not entirely, diminished. Also, we don’t achieve our goal if the students can easily defeat the mandatory attendance system; all a student has to do is give his ID card to a buddy who attends class. So will mandatory attendance actually improve student success? Yes, for a few students on the fence, attending class more often will make the difference between a pass and a fail, and some of our students do need a push in the right direction. But what worries me more about mandatory attendance is a negative unintended consequence. University instructors unaccustomed to unruly and disrespectful students are in for shock. They will be spending more effort on classroom management and it will negatively affect their ability to teach. Effort expended on making the courses more relevant, interesting, and engaging without lowering standards is a far better return on investment. If a course is compelling, students will gladly attend and value the lessons you deliver. Isn’t that better than forcing them to sit through a dull lecture?

Further reading

A Case Against Compulsory Class Attendance Policies in Higher Education

Skipping class in college and exam performance: Evidence from a regression discontinuity classroom experiment

Does Mandatory Attendance Improve Student Performance? (.pdf)

Do students go to class? Should they?

Should class attendance be mandatory?

Using Assessment to Engage Your Students

by Sue Pieper
Coordinator for Assessment, e-Learning Center at Northern Arizona University

How can we get students to attend our classes?

How can we get students to participate in class?

How can we prevent students from cheating?

These questions dominated the conversations at a recent Course Redesign (CR) Conference, and faculty in the small group sessions on assessment were adamant about getting some answers. While these were very real concerns for course instructors, now, a few weeks after the conference, I continue to wonder whether their questions were getting at the core of the issue. I wonder if these concerns might, in fact, be symptoms of an underlying “disease” infecting our students—particularly students in large classes. Could our students be suffering from a lack of engagement?

What is student engagement, really? Researchers and educators have tossed around the term for years. Definitions of student engagement have varied greatly, from students’ time-on-task behaviors (Brophy, 1983) to their use of metacognition and self-regulation (Pintrich and De Groot, 1990). Most definitions have included some element of students connecting with and thinking deeply about the course content. These are desirable outcomes for any classroom instructor, but they are not always easy to achieve, especially if you are teaching a class of 100+ students.

What’s an Instructor to Do?

There are plenty of ideas out there in the literature. I did a quick search of an education database for “student engagement” and found over 5,000 entries! The problem is in knowing where to begin. So here’s my attempt to provide assistance: three steps for using assessment to create a more engaging course. These steps are based on the CR Conference discussions as well as my work consulting with faculty who are designing assessments for their online, hybrid, and web-enhanced courses.

Take a look at what you’re already doing.

You can incorporate questions about assessment in your end-of-the-course evaluations. Better yet, throughout the semester you can ask the students about how the course assessments are going. Psychology professor Melissa Birkett recently developed a survey that she’ll administer at mid-semester in her PSY 255 course, Introduction to Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience. The survey asks students about a new portfolio project she’s incorporated into the course. In addition to some scaled items, Melissa asks students to write short answers to items such as “One aspect of this project I enjoyed was…” “One aspect of this project I found challenging was…” and “I learned the most from this project by…” By administering the survey mid-semester, Melissa will be able to make small modifications before the course ends, if necessary, as well as plan for next semester’s portfolio project. For other methods of gathering students’ reactions to your course assessments, check out the chapter on Techniques for Assessing Learner Reactions to Instruction in Thomas A. Angelo and K. Patricia Cross’s Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers.

Think about what you might do differently.

Which course assessment strategies are working for you, and which need some work? CR Conference participants provided lots of ideas for rethinking how you use assessment in your course. Nora Dunbar, Psychology lecturer and CR Conference participant, suggested thinking about incorporating collaborative work. If you’ve historically used individual assignments and assessments, consider including group/pair work. Students learn from sharing ideas. You, the instructor, will benefit, too. If the group, rather than each individual student, is responsible for a discussion post or final project, then you will have fewer final products to assess.Paula Garcia McAllister, Director of Northern Arizona University’s Institutional Review Board, suggested using short writing assignments in courses. If you’ve routinely used only mid-term and final multiple-choice exams to assess students, think about integrating several brief papers throughout the semester and using a rubric. Think about your criteria for assessing students, and then in the rubric, for each criterion describe the performance levels that correspond to the grade or points you will award. Up-front work in constructing a solid rubric leads to huge payoffs for you and your students. Your students will know exactly what kind of performance you expect from them, and you will spend less time assessing. The quality of students’ work is also likely to improve as the semester progresses. For a quick overview of how to make and use a rubric, take a look at Peter Gow’s slide show.

Some of these ideas are discussed in more depth in the Tuesday Tips on Teaching with Technology podcasts Assessment and Large Course Redesign with Wally Nolan and Sue Pieper and Pedagogy and Large Course Redesign with John Doherty and Wally Nolan. These podcasts are available as part of a podcast series (iTunes U link) on using technology to improve teaching and learning. You might also find two books from the Jossey-Bass Guides to Online Teaching and Learning series helpful: Rita-Marie Conrad and J. Ana Donaldson’s Engaging the Online Learner and Rena M. Palloff and Keith Pratt’s Assessing the Online Learner.

Consider whether technology could help.

Once you’ve decided what you’d like to change about the assessments in your course, think about how technology might assist you. Cathryn Ellis, Theatre professor and CR Conference participant, added Blackboard Vista quizzes before the start of her class and found that drop/fail/withdraw grades decreased and student understanding of the course material increased. Short quizzes administered online throughout the semester provide immediate and ongoing feedback and help students to learn. They also help you know how and where to focus instruction. Other instructors are experimenting with “clickers,” automatic response systems that can be used to promote collaboration and critical thinking among students. For more about clickers, see John Doherty and Wally Nolan’s blog post, Pedagogy and Large Course Redesign. You might also want to check out a couple of resource sites that provide information about how to implement clickers and the impact of clickers on student learning. For more about web tools that could be used for assessment, take a look at Educause Quarterly Magazine, Volume 2, Number 4, 2009. The entire issue is devoted to technology tools and student engagement.

After you’ve implemented a new assessment technique, you’ll need to ask students again how your course assessments are working for them. If you continue to follow the steps listed above, you will be able to improve your course over time. However, these ideas are only the beginning of a treatment for lack of student engagement in our courses. I’d like to hear about what you’re doing to promote student engagement in your classes. Have you tried any of these strategies or techniques in your classes? How have you engaged students through assessment? Feel free to share your ideas in the comments.

Resources

Brophy, J. (1983). Conceptualizing student motivation. Educational Psychologist, 18 (3), 200-215.

Pintrich, P. R., & De Groot, E. V. (1990). Motivational and self-regulated learning components of classroom academic performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 82 (1): 33-40.

Pedagogy and Large Course Redesign

By John J. Doherty and Wally Nolan
Instructional Designers,  e-Learning Center at Northern Arizona University

In this semester’s episodes of our podcast series, Tuesday Tips on Teaching With Technology (iTunes U link), we are highlighting some discussions from the recent Course Redesign Conference held at NAU. With our faculty colleague, Dr. Brandon Cruickshank of the NAU Department of Chemistry, we facilitated discussions on pedagogy, and we saw three major themes emerge from the discussions:

• Coverage versus depth
• Student engagement
• Academic integrity

Coverage versus Depth

We asked conference participants how we could think less about content and more about promoting deeper knowledge or mastery of fewer skills. We were interested in understanding how participants helped their students to “drill down” in depth, as opposed to trying to cover as much as possible in the lecture. Participants pointed out that curriculum designers design things backwards, focusing too much on coverage of content and not enough on student understanding of content. They suggested that instead of “spewing content,” instructors could focus on the essential understandings we want our students to come away with, those important concepts and applications that students will be able to recall five years from now.

This reminds us of the ideas of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTigue, whose Understanding by Design is in its second edition and now has a supporting web site that serves as a curriculum development “exchange.” Understanding By Design suggests the following stages of curriculum development (.pdf):

• Objectives: What are the desired results?
• Assessment: How will students demonstrate that they have achieved these results?
• Learning plan: What learning activities will help students develop their understanding of the content?

If we spend more time in class focusing on deeper knowledge and getting students to think about material in greater depth, then they will be able to gain broader knowledge outside of class. In other words, we don’t have to cover all the material in class; we just have to give students the foundation to be able to learn further on their own through directed activities that occur outside of class.

Our discussion focused in part on the use of clickers by some of our participants. Dr. Cruickshank makes extensive use of clickers in his chemistry classes. For example, he used clickers to quiz his students about reaction rates, a topic he had not covered in class before the quiz. After the students answered some questions and looked at the responses of the whole class, he had them talk in groups, then answer again. He then assigned homework that covered the same general topics. Some students who visited him during office hours said, “We didn’t do this yet in class.” He replied, “Yes, that’s what the clicker question was about.” It was, he said, a light bulb moment. In other words, he gave them the framework without being explicit about it.

Student Engagement

Dr. Cruickshank’s clicker example is one way of engaging students in large courses. He used the clickers to spark student interaction with each other. By making students active participants in their classes and, therefore, in their learning, we can better engage them with the concepts and ideas that we want them to learn.

The online publication Faculty Focus recently published Building Student Engagement: 15 Strategies for the College Classroom, a report that offers some helpful tips for getting students involved in their own learning. Another way to get students engaged is to have them prepare for class not only by reading or interacting with assigned material, but also by completing self-assessments or pre-tests of their knowledge. We talk more about pre-class activities in two earlier podcasts, episodes 19 and 20, on Pre-, During-, and Post-Class Learning. Faculty who try this approach note that their students are more engaged and even seem to be having more fun. Some students even told Dr. Cruickshank that his “class seems so short.”

One key to engagement is peer instruction, a concept developed for the sciences in detail by Eric Mazur (1997; Crouch and Mazur, 2001), currently the Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Harvard University. The success of peer instruction stems from research indicating that dialogically rich learning environments—those that emphasize dialogue among students and between the teacher and students—help students develop critical thinking and in-depth conceptual understandings. For more information about research in this area, see Reiter, 1994; Anderson et al., 1996, 2001; deCorte, 1996; and Matthews, 1996.

Mazur began using peer instruction in his introductory physics classes in the late 1980s and 1990s to give his students immediate feedback on concept tests during his lecture time. He later began using audience response systems (clickers) to better manage the peer instruction. Together with Catherine Crouch (Crouch and Mazur, 2001) he has shown that introduction of these methods into their classes led to significant improvements in students’ conceptual reasoning.

An excellent comparative study by Nicol and Boyle (2003) of Strathclyde University provides more information on this method and its potential application to large courses.

Academic Integrity

Briefly, the last topic of interest at the course redesign conference was academic integrity, or more specifically, strategies instructors could use to detect plagiarism in their students’ work. A few software solutions are available, such as TurnItIn and SafeAssign. Both products compare student writing to a database of other assignments, research articles, and the Internet, and they produce reports for faculty or students indicating the likelihood that the student writing is original. An unstated implication of these tools, though, is that students are intentional plagiarizers, which might not be the case. As one participant in our conversation noted, we need to keep the “generation gap” in mind, remembering that students and faculty have different levels of comfort and understanding with both the technology and the concepts of academic integrity. We need to educate both faculty and students about generational, cultural, and societal definitions and practices related to academic integrity. Indeed, we at the e-Learning Center are working on a tutorial to do just that.

And finally…

The issues surrounding course redesign are many and varied. NAU faculty identified the three we’ve explored here and in our podcast as some of the more important. We’d like to know more about what others think. What pedagogical issues do you face in your large courses? What strategies do you employ to resolve some of these issues? Use the comments feature in this blog to share your ideas. We look forward to hearing from you.

References

(** = full text access)

Anderson, T., Howe, C. and Tolmie, A. (1996). Interaction and mental models of physics phenomena: evidence from dialogue between learners. In, Oakhill, I. and Garnham, A., Mental Models in Cognitive Science. London: Taylor and Francis.

Anderson, T., Howe, C., Soden, R., Halliday, J. and Low, J. (2001). Peer interaction and the learning of critical thinking skills in further education students (.pdf). Instructional Science, 29(1): pp. 1–32.  **

Crouch, C.H. and Mazur, E. (2001). Peer instruction: Ten years of experience and results (.pdf). American Journal of Physics, 69(9): pp.970-977.  **

DeCorte, E. (1996). New perspectives on learning and teaching in higher education. In, Burgen A. (Ed.) Goals and Purposes of Higher Education in the 21st Century. London: Jessica Kingsley.

Matthews, R.S. (1996). Collaborative learning: Creating knowledge with students. In, Menges, R.J., Weimer, M. and Associates (Eds.) Teaching on Solid Ground: Using Scholarship to Improve Practice. San Fransisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Mazur, E. (1997) Peer instruction: A user’s manual. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Wiggins, G. and McTigue, J. (2005). Understanding by design. (Expanded 2nd Ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. **

Nicol, D.J and Boyle, J.T. (2003). Peer Instruction versus Class-wide Discussion in Large Classes: a comparison of two interaction methods in the wired classroom. Studies in Higher Education 28(4): pp. 457-473. **

Reiter, S.N. (1994). Teaching dialogically: Its relationship to critical thinking in college students. In, Pintrich, P.R., Brown, D.R., and Weinstein, C.E. (Eds.). Student motivation, cognition and learning. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.  **

This blog post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tips for Teaching Online

by Lorraine B. Elder

Dr. Judith V. Boettcher has written Teaching Online for the First Time — The Quick Guide. She lists ten best practices for designing and teaching a course, and most are spot on, with the possible exception of

Best Practice 5: Use both synchronous and asynchronous activities

Using both kinds of activities works only if your online students know up front that’s an expectation. Many students think online inherently means asynchronous, so be clear in your class description about whether synchronous activities are included in the course, and be sure to list the dates and times of the synchronous activities on a class preview page so students can figure out even before they register whether their school, work, and life schedules will permit them to be available at those times.

To Dr. Boettcher’s list, I’d add a few more implementation tips that the e-Learning Center has learned from years of working with faculty in preparing online and hybrid courses.

1. Don’t try to create an online course on the fly while you’re teaching it. You won’t like it and neither will your students.

If your in-person teaching style entails glancing at your notes—or not—a few minutes before class starts and then winging it by speaking extemporaneously, you’ll be tempted to approach online teaching the same way. Don’t do it. You’ll fumble with the technology (or it will go down at an inopportune time); you won’t have an adequate list of resources and supplemental materials available for your students; you’ll forget to include important details in your assignment instructions, confusing your students and sparking a flood of emails or discussion posts asking for clarification; and in an asynchronous course, your students will be irritated if they’re ready to proceed but you aren’t because you haven’t yet built out the course. They’re busy people, too, who don’t want you wasting their time.

2. Posting PowerPoint presentations online does not constitute an online course, no matter how many slides you include.

A bunch of bullet points out of context and lacking a speaker to fill in the details isn’t what students need. Neither are slides packed with overstuffed paragraphs. If you need to write paragraphs to convey your information, put them on a web page, not on a slide. Put the bullet points on web pages, too, and also write the information you would have said aloud in a face-to-face presentation. Or include an audio recording (with transcripts!) of what you would have said to accompany the slides.

Don’t expect students to intuit what you meant by your cryptic, one- or two-word bullets. What’s obvious to you—an expert— won’t be obvious to them—novices. Explain yourself.

I’ll have more to say on the evils of PowerPoint in a future blog post.

3. Make your course accessible to all students, including those who have disabilities.

It’s easy and desirable in an online course to include clips of rich instructional media, such as videos and audio. Be sure to include captioning or transcripts so that all students get the full benefit of the media without having to ask for special accommodations. Even students who don’t have disabilities often appreciate captions and transcripts. Also make sure your course can be navigated easily with a keyboard, not just a mouse, and check with your campus Disability Resources office to be sure that screen reader software can interpret your course material.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.