The Get Engaged: Tips for Student Engagement series is a weekly e-mail message that describes an instructional strategy that faculty might find helpful in promoting active learning and student engagement. The Get Engaged tips are based on the scholarly literature on teaching and suggestions from faculty who have successfully used the strategy in their teaching.

Do you have an instructional strategy that improves student learning or promotes student engagement with your class? Send a 200 word (or less) description of your teaching tip to Claudia Stanny at the Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment (cstanny@uwf.edu) for posting in a future Get Engaged mailing.

If you do not currently receive the Get Engaged e-mail but would like to receive future postings, contact CUTLA (cutla@uwf.edu), and you will be added to the distribution list.

 

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Spring Semester

April 13, 2010

What is Universal Design of Instruction?

Universal Design of Instruction (UDI) is an approach to teaching that consists of a proactive design and use of inclusive instructional strategies that benefit a broad range of learners including students with disabilities. 

The seven principles of UDI provide a framework for faculty to use when designing or revising instruction to be responsive to diverse student learners and to minimize the need for "special" accommodations and retrofitted changes to the learning environment. UDI operates on the premise that the planning and delivery of instruction as well as the evaluation of learning can incorporate inclusive attributes that embrace diversity in learners without compromising academic standards.

Seven Principles of UDI

1. Equitable Use. The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities. For example, a website that is designed so that it is accessible to everyone, including students who are blind and using text-to-speech software, employs this principle.
2. Flexibility in Use. The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities. An example is a museum that allows a visitor to choose to read or listen to the description of the contents of a display case.
3. Simple and Intuitive. Use of the design is easy to understand, regardless of the user's experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level. Science lab equipment with control buttons that are clear and intuitive is a good example of an application of this principle.
4. Perceptible Information. The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user's sensory abilities. An example of this principle being employed is when multimedia projected in a noisy academic conference exhibit includes captioning.
5. Tolerance for Error. The design minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions. An example of a product applying this principle is educational software that provides guidance when the student makes an inappropriate selection.
6. Low Physical Effort. The design can be used efficiently and comfortably, and with a minimum of fatigue. Doors that are easy to open by people with a wide variety of physical characteristics demonstrate the application of this principle.
7. Size and Space for Approach and Use. Appropriate size and space is provided for approach, reach, manipulation, and use regardless of the user's body size, posture, or mobility. A science lab work area designed for use by students with a wide variety of physical characteristics and abilities is an example of employing this principle.

Information about UDI is from the University of Washington DO-IT program.
http://www.washington.edu/doit/

The guidelines are from The Center for Universal Design at North Carolina University.
http://www.design.ncsu.edu/cud/

Thanks to Vannee Cao-Nguyen, Ed.D., Assistant Director of the UWF Student Disability Resource Center for this teaching tip.

April 6, 2010

Help students organize their learning by identifying the “big questions” for your course

Gerald Nosich (2009) points out that any large body of knowledge has a core belief, “a fundamental and powerful concept . . . that can be used to explain or think out a huge body of questions, problems, information, and situations.”  Fundamental concepts are useful for instruction because they help students understand and organize the course content.  Blythe and Sweet note that they begin their courses in World Literature each semester with a discussion of one fundamental idea that illuminates the overall content of the course:  Art reflects its culture.  In each subsequent class, they discuss how the work studied that day reveals something about the culture that produced it. 

Identifying a few fundamental concepts for your course serves two purposes. First, it demonstrates your own mastery of the subject.  Second, it creates a touchstone for your students to organize their understanding of new content throughout the semester. These fundamental concepts will also transfer to other courses within the discipline.  When students complete a course in World Literature and then take a course in English or American Literature, they will begin these courses with the advantage of knowing that the works they will study will reveal aspects of English or American culture.

Tip contributed by Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet, Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY.

Nosich, G. (2009). Learning to think things through: A guide to critical thinking across the curriculum (3rd ed.)  Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

 

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March 30, 2010

Use effective grading strategies to help survive the demands of grading during finals week

• Remember that judgment is a part of every grade, whether it is a judgment about what to measure, how to measure it, or how to assign a point value to a component of student work when computing a grade.

• If your criteria for learning are clear, student work is easier to score and score consistently. Rubrics help you score more efficiently and provide feedback that informs students about how they might improve their work.  Visit http://uwf.edu/cutla/rubricdevelopment.cfm  for a description of rubric development and links to examples of rubrics for a variety of assignments.
  
  
• Pace the grading task so that you remain fresh.  Break the task into components that will allow you to complete each component in one sitting (e.g., grade all student responses to essay question one in one grading session, then grade all responses to essay question two in a separate grading session).  Distributing the task over several sessions will enable you to grade each question efficiently and consistently. You can defer grading remaining questions to another day, when you will be rested.
  
  
• Make notes while grading about things you want to change in your next set of instructions, based on common student errors.  Keep these notes for your contribution to departmental documentation of use of assessment evidence for improvement of courses – your department chair and colleagues will appreciate this contribution to departmental assessment efforts!
  
  
• If the paper isn’t going to be returned to the student (or if you know that students seldom pick up these papers), don’t mark a lot of feedback.  Make minimal notes that are sufficiently detailed to document your decisions should a student raise a question about his or her grade. 

Thanks to Sally L. Kuhlenschmidt, Ph.D., Director, Faculty Center for Excellence in Teaching (FaCET), Western Kentucky University,  for contributions to this teaching tip.
http://www.wku.edu/teaching/

March 23, 2010

Improving student learning by helping students understand the value of errors for improvement of self-regulated learning

Self-regulated learning involves acquiring skills such as setting goals, monitoring progress during study, and evaluating and modifying study strategies to improve performance on a learning task.

Two problems plague student learning:

1. Students are frequently overconfident about their knowledge.  They assume they will understand new material just by sitting through a lecture or reading a chapter.
2. Students tend to attribute failures to outside forces (The teacher is mean, The textbook wasn’t clear) rather than attributing failures to internal factors (I didn’t study enough, I didn’t study with effective strategies).

Barry Zimmerman (CUNY) argues that students can be coached to evaluate their study strategies and monitor their learning progress realistically to improve learning and overall skill in learning new material.

Effective coaching requires that instructors provide accurate feedback about learning so that students can assess strengths and weaknesses in their study strategies.  When students make mistakes, they need coaching to help them reflect accurately on what went wrong.  It isn’t enough to simply provide accurate feedback to students.  Ensure that students process this feedback by requiring them to demonstrate that they understand the feedback they receive.

One way to encourage students to reflect on feedback is to ask them to respond to the following questions after getting feedback on exam performance:

1. Did you do as well as you expected?
2. If not, why not?
3. What will you do differently when preparing for the next exam to make the outcome different?

This approach is particularly effective when it is connected with specific content because the strategy that will work when solving one type of problem might differ from the strategy that will be effective when attempting to solve a different type of problem.

Barry Zimmerman (Ed. Psych, CUNY) runs a self-regulated learning project at CUNY.  This tip is based on an article on Dr. Zimmerman’s project published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, February 12, 2010.

March 16, 2010

Engaging Students through Problem-Based and Collaborative Learning Activities

Activities that actively engage students with course content, provide opportunities to practice and apply discipline-based skills, and enable students to collaborate with one another to encourage peer instruction are effective methods for improving student learning and connecting students with one another and their institution.

The Center for Teaching & Learning at Brigham Young University hosts a web page on collaborative learning in which 5 faculty members describe collaborative learning activities they use in their courses, discuss their rationale for using these strategies, and share their observations of the benefits for student learning.  Individual videos are short (the longest is about 7 minutes long) and include videos of students engaged in the activities described.

Topics discussed in these videos include:

William Baker, Management Communication
Video describes collaborative learning strategies in a Business Communication course, including the use of teams, peer instruction, peer review, and a capstone project.

Deborah Hines, Nursing
Video describes problem-based learning activities with peer coaching in a clinical setting.

Matthew Mason, History
Video describes active learning strategies that engage students with primary resources and develop communication skills.

Janet Young
Video describes the use of a short writing activity at the beginning of class to promote student preparation for class and support in-class discussion.

Center for Teaching & Learning, Brigham Young University
Videos of faculty discussing their use of a collaborative learning strategy
http://ctl.byu.edu/teaching-tips/collaborative-learning

March 2, 2010

Using electronic tools to manage collaborations with students and colleagues

Current technology now provides a variety of tools that allow faculty to collaborate with students and colleagues.  E-mail enables rapid communication and exchange of documents with collaborators.  Faculty can now easily draft and edit a manuscript with co-authors on several continents by sending documents as attachments or sharing documents through other electronic forums.  For example, Google Documents and Google Sites allow faculty to share and edit documents without exchanging large attachments in e-mail.

Although technology creates many convenient tools for collaboration, it also creates vulnerabilities to the security of intellectual property and personal identity.   When collaborating with students and colleagues in the UWF community, faculty are sometimes tempted to provide access to files on a computer or server by disclosing their instead of using a more secure collaboration tool.  ITS and CUTLA developed a new information website that discusses the tools currently available for electronic collaboration that will help faculty easily share files with students and colleagues without compromising security.

The new web site is located at http://uwf.edu/cutla.

Thanks to Sylvia Maxwell and Michael White (ITS) for contributions to this teaching tip.

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February 23, 2010 (Faculty Friday – Tenure & Promotion, February 26; Difficult Dialogs Seminar (CAS))

Managing difficult situations with students

Although we prefer to envision engaging in spirited conversations with students about controversies within our discipline, sometimes faculty must have a difficult conversation with a student about a stressful topic such as a violation of academic integrity, academic shortcomings that are likely to prevent the student from pursuing his or her goal of entering an advanced professional degree program, disruptive behavior in class, or similar topics.  How to handle these difficult situations?

The members of the College of Arts and Sciences Council will collaborate with students in Kevin Kern’s Acting for the Camera class to enact scenarios that depict some of these “difficult dialogs.”   Kevin’s troupe will create dramatic enactments of appropriate and inappropriate ways to respond to a variety of difficult situations.  Facilitators will provide advice and best practices for how best to handle a variety of difficult situations.

Where:	Mainstage Theatre (BLDG 82)
When:	1:30 PM – 3:00 PM, February 26, 2010

Provost King will host a wine reception in the Mainstage Lobby immediately following this event.

February 16, 2010

Providing useful feedback to students about their writing

Developing students’ skill in writing requires that they write frequently, get meaningful feedback about their writing, and revise their writing in response to this feedback.  The process of revising determines the quality of writing in the final document, but unskilled writers tend to primarily correct superficial errors in their revisions (Levy & Ransdell, 1995).

Joanne Frattaroli finds that her students improve their writing when they are given feedback on an early submission, especially if the feedback provides global information about writing issues (e.g., a comment that there are many missing commas and direction to a campus resource where students can get a refresher on comma rules) instead of copyediting that identifies all the missing commas.

Providing students with feedback about their writing before they submit a writing assignment for evaluation can be a challenge.  Reading rough drafts a few days before reading the same work as final papers doubles the reading workload of instructors.  Keep your workload manageable by giving students an early deadline for an optional pre-submission of “near complete” drafts for review and feedback.  Make the pre-submission deadline 5-7 days before the final paper is due. Accept and review only those drafts that are “near complete” and do not accept any drafts submitted after the deadline for pre-submissions. The early deadline gives you enough time to make comments, gives students enough time to revise their work in response to feedback, and, combined with the requirement that drafts be “submission-ready,” prevents a flood of papers for review. 

Create a learning benefit for all students in the class by making a list of common mistakes or issues seen in the pre-submission drafts you review and give this handout to all students in the class. Encourage students to use this handout to self-evaluate their writing and revise their paper before submission.

Based on a suggestion from:
Joanne Frattaroli, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology and Social Behavior
University of California, Irvine

Levy, C. M., & Ransdell, S. (1995).  Is writing as difficult as it seems? Memory & Cognition, 23, 767-779.  doi: 1996-22510-001

February 9, 2010

Add a discipline-relevant multicultural component to your course

Students may lack a sense of the larger world, a serious problem in an age of globalization. The following assignment brings students into contact with other cultures while keeping the focus on the content of the course discipline. 

Ask students to write about a topic relevant to the class that includes resources from English-language media from around the world. Faculty may consult with their subject specialist librarian for assistance in directing their students to international media resources.

Require students to represent countries from 3 continents in their paper. The articles selected

• should represent the culture of the country in which the work was published,
• must not be about the United States or research conducted in the United States, and
• should not be an advertisement.

Students should summarize each article, describe whether the article is published by a government agency or an independent press, and describe the questions the article addresses. Ask students to describe the point of view or assumptions made in the article and summarize the facts presented and the conclusions drawn. Students should describe whether the article is consistent with what they’ve read about their topic in resources published in the United States.  Finally, students should describe how the articles were similar and different to one another and reflect on whether reading several international viewpoints altered their opinion, surprised them, or led them to any new conclusions.

Assess the work on clarity, accuracy, logic, relevance, depth and breadth, and the absence of plagiarism.

Students will benefit from this activity by broadening their horizons and experiencing the perspectives of the global community. They might even develop a curiosity about international perspectives and news sources.

Based on a tip provided by:
Sally Kuhlenschmidt
Department of Psychology/Faculty Center for Excellence in Teaching
Western Kentucky University

Thanks to Britt McGowan, Shari Johnson, and Melissa Finley Gonzalez for additional information about using resources in the UWF library.

February 2, 2010

Improve student learning by evaluating what students retain from a lecture

Ever wonder how well your students understand and remember that lecture you worked so hard to prepare? It seemed clear. Students seemed to follow your line of reasoning. What do they actually remember? 

The Focused Listing activity takes only a few minutes to complete at the end of class and can provide useful information about how much students recall from the class meeting.

• Identify either the number of points you want students to retrieve (5 to 10) or the amount of time (3 to 5 minutes) you give them to list the major points from a class meeting.
• Using the same time you plan to give your students, write down the main points you plan to make during the class meeting. Use your list as the answer key when you review student responses. This step will also help you determine if any modifications are needed for the in-class activity (e.g., changing the number of items you ask students to list or changing the amount of time allowed for responses). Because students are novices, expect that they will require more time to list the points than you require.
• At the end of the class session, ask students to write down the main points from the day’s discussion/lecture.
• Collect the responses and compare student answers to your key. Sort student responses into “appropriate” and “inappropriate” categories to determine how well students recalled the main points included in your list.
• Responses can be collected anonymously to inform you about student understanding of your presentation. You can also ask students to identify themselves and use their responses as part of a class participation grade.
• Review the findings of the activity at the beginning of the next class session.  List the points or ideas you developed and include some of the ideas students reported that were not on your list, but were still relevant.

This activity can help instructors determine whether the main points they intended to make during class were actually perceived by students as important.

The activity can promote student learning by helping students:

• Improve note-taking skills by providing students with feedback about whether they are paying attention to and noting the most important points made during class
• Provide practice to students with memory skills and retrieving course content
• Improve listening skills (especially if this activity is used repeatedly)

Angelo, T. A. & Cross, K. P. (1993) Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for college teachers (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Based on a tip provided by:
David Sacks
University of Kentucky

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January 26, 2010

Encouraging active learning by adding clicker questions to your class

Student response systems (“clickers”) can be used in a variety of ways to engage students with course content and promote deep learning. Clickers can also promote the development of faculty expertise in addressing problems in student learning. For example, Derek Bruff notes that one instructor was shocked when he discovered that students’ performance on a clicker question did not improve after students heard his standard explanation of a confusing concept. He had firmly believed that this explanation was crystal clear, but student performance clearly indicated that this explanation did not improve student understanding. Students were just as confused after hearing the explanation as before. The instructor decided that he needed to find a better way to explain this concept and discovered that he could use clicker questions to determine immediately whether a given explanation improved student understanding.

Want to learn more about strategies for using clickers?

The Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching has a rich supply of resources on the use of clickers, including a list of resources organized by discipline:
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/cft/resources/teaching_resources/technology/crs_biblio.htm

You can also find a useful resource page full of technical examples, including some video demonstrations of instructors using clickers on the Vanderbilt site:
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/cft/resources/teaching_resources/technology/crs.htm

Derek Bruff also hosts a blog, Teaching with Classroom Response Systems:
http://derekbruff.org/?cat=122

UWF now hosts a Student Response System Users Group as a Google Group.
Click on the Sites option in your UWF GMail to access and join this group.

January 19, 2010

Evaluating students on class participation

Want to include class participation in your grading but find it difficult to grade participation fairly?

Develop a rubric to evaluate student participation. Suggested criteria for a rubric include:

• How often did the student participate during class?
• Were contributions relevant to the topic under discussion?
• Did the student appear to be adequately prepared? Did contributions reflect or apply the content of course readings?
• Did the student contribute new ideas?
• What was the quality of evidence of critical thinking in the contribution?
• How well did the student listen to the contributions of others? Did the student engage in civil behavior during discussions (avoid interrupting others, use respectful language, etc.)?

Share your participation rubric with students in the first week of the class. Invite student comments and suggestions for revisions (within acceptable boundaries). This strategy will clearly communicate your expectations for effective participation and promote student acceptance of these criteria.

Evaluating participation in every class session can become burdensome and encourage student participation merely for the sake of earning points that day. Instead, use the rubric to grade student participation once a month. This strategy will allow you to base your evaluation of participation for intervals of time that will be manageable for your ability to recall student behavior. It will also provide students with feedback about their early participation and allow them to make corrections and improve participation across the term.

This tip is based in part on a contribution by JoAnne Majors of Immaculata University to the web site of the Teaching and Learning Center, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia.

January 12, 2010

Help students succeed in your course by sharing effective study strategies

As experts in academia, faculty sometimes forget that the study habits that enabled them to be successful as students and distinguished them as competitive applicants to graduate programs were (and continue to be) rare skills among undergraduate students. Share your expertise as a student with your students and describe the skills and habits they should acquire to be successful in your course.

An example of this sharing of expertise is the following handout that Julie Ann Williams provides to students in her Operations Management course at the beginning of the term. Although some of her advice is specific to successful completion of this course, much advice is transferrable to other courses.

How to Be Successful in MAN3504

• Prepare for class. At the beginning of each lecture section, a list of preparation tasks are listed. For maximum learning and grade benefit, do these tasks prior to the lecture. The preparation tasks include reading appropriate materials, reviewing solved problems, thinking about discussion problems, working problems, and thinking about application issues.  Many of the practice problems have solutions posted on eLearning.  Student feedback has indicated that separating practice questions and solutions helped them to study better for the quizzes and tests.
• Attend every class on time with your textbook and course packet, calculator, and ruler, ready to take notes and enjoy discussing the topics.
• Review your notes after each lecture. 
• Check your course eLearning website and email for any new course materials as well as for solutions to some of the preparation practice problems.
• Email or bring questions to class or office hours, especially before each quiz! For example, bring a question from your lecture preparation activities to class.
• Work the practice problems in your course packet as well as even numbered problems (for which your textbook provides answers to check your work).  Practice will help you learn the methods so you can apply them in a timely manner. Some of the practice problems have detailed solutions on eLearning.
• Study for quizzes, the midterm, and the final. Take every quiz! Even though there is a drop quiz, you will still see that material on a midterm or exam.
• Look for applications in your everyday life and the business world.  For example, past students have brought examples of packaging design (we discussed the impact on the supply chain, etc.), product design, process design, menu design, scheduling, etc. that we discussed in class.  Bringing an example of operations management concepts will make the course more interesting and relevant to you.  

Thanks to Julie Ann Williams for sharing this handout.

Julie Ann Stuart Williams, Ph.D., P.E.
Associate Professor
Department of Management/MIS
University of West Florida

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Fall Semester

December 1, 2009

Electronic Information Literacy: Promoting Netiquette in your Class

The campus migration to Gmail provides us with an opportunity to revisit how faculty and students use e-mail for communication. Capitalize on this opportunity by discussing e-mail netiquette with students in your class.

The introduction of electronic communication (e-mail, online threaded discussions, Twitter feeds, etc.) to class interaction poses a new set of challenges for instructors: Teaching students to communicate professionally in electronic media. Faculty might initially think of this issue mainly in terms of their own response to inappropriate language from students in e-mail (Hey! Missed class yesterday. Did I miss anything?) and posts to online discussions (i don’t get the reading this week – booooooring 
: - (   will this be on the test?).

Effective communication through electronic media is an important skill. Help your students develop this skill with the following strategies:

• Establish some guidelines and communicate these clearly at the beginning of class. Put your guidelines in your syllabus along with your guidelines for appropriate conduct in class. Post your guidelines with course materials and in the instructions for threaded discussions in an online course.
• Guidelines for effective communication through e-mail might include the following:
• Create meaningful subject lines. Some instructors require students to identify the course number in the subject line. Faculty can use this information to filter and label messages from one class and redirect these messages to a specific group outside the inbox in Gmail.
• Subject lines should briefly describe the topic of the message.
• Describe appropriate (and inappropriate) salutations. If you have a preference, state how you would like to be addressed. Students appreciate direct instruction about how their instructor wants to be addressed in face-to-face interactions, too.
• Senders should clearly identify themselves. Who is Jen who mails from hothonney@yahoo.com? Remind students of the impression these informal e-mail addresses have when students use them for professional communications.
• Pay attention to whether you are using reply or reply all to avoid distributing private messages to unintended parties.
• Remember to attach attachments.
• Encourage students to think of e-mail communication and posts to online discussions as a form of academic writing, which requires the use of standard grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Good web guidelines on netiquette can be found at the following:

Virginia Commonwealth University
Center for Teaching Excellence
http://www.vcu.edu/cte/resources/OTLRG/04_12_Behavior.html

Texas Tech University
Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center
http://www.tlpd.ttu.edu/content/asp/blackboard/Resources/netiquette.asp

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November 17, 2009

Minimizing distractions in the classroom that interfere with student learning

Instructors may use a handout in class and begin talking about the content of the handout at the same time that they distribute it. This also creates a multi-tasking situation, since students must pass the handout down the rows and they may need some time to read the material before the instructor begins discussing or elaborating. This problem also occurs at faculty meetings, when documents are distributed for discussion at a meeting, rather than in advance of the meeting. People need time to read and think about the content of the document before they can engage in meaningful discussion of its content.

Based on:

Matlin, M. (2007). How cognitive psychology can enhance your students’ learning. In S. A. Meyers & J. R. Stowell (Eds.), Essays from E-xcellence in Teaching (Chapter 9), Volume 7.
E-book retrieved from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology Web site:
http://teachpsych.org/ebooks/eit2007/index.php#.UbifxfnVAk0

November 9, 2009

Improving project management: Deadlines as the solution to overconfidence in estimating time to complete a project

One characteristic of the cognitive problem of overconfidence is the tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a project. This overconfidence may be fueled in part by a phenomenon known as confirmation bias, the tendency to selectively retrieve and attend to information that is consistent with a preferred hypothesis (rather than searching for evidence that the hypothesis might be wrong). When estimating time to complete a project, people tend to prefer the hypothesis that the project is manageable, resources will be readily available, and no unexpected events will occur that will create obstacles to progress or otherwise delay project completion. Of course, resources are frequently more difficult to obtain than anticipated and various events (increased work load in other courses, changes in off-campus employment demands, family emergencies, illnesses, auto accidents, weather events, etc.) can produce delays that push back initial deadlines.

The solution to this problem is to create multiple deadlines (“milestone” deadlines) throughout the term for a large-scale project that is due at the end of the term. Although this strategy might strike some as “hand holding,” this suggestion is consistent with “real world” practices for managing procrastination. Wistrich (2008) examined the effect of procrastination and the problem of failing to meet deadlines associated with filing legal claims within the statute of limitation. Wistrich notes that imposing a deadline improves task completion. Setting long-term deadlines not only fails to improve task completion, allowing a long time for task completion makes the task resemble a task that has no specific deadline. Tasks with self-imposed deadlines or no clear deadline are least likely to be completed. Thus, short deadlines increase the likelihood that tasks will be completed on time and multiple, spaced deadlines for a large project are more likely to result in successful task completion than a single long-term deadline. 

Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994) Exploring the “planning fallacy”: Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 366-381.

Newby-Clark, I. R., Ross, M., Buehler, R., Koehler, D. J., & Griffin, D. (2000). People focus on optimistic scenarios and disregard pessimistic scenarios while predicting task completion times. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 6, 171-182.

Wistrich, A. J. (2008). Procrastination, deadlines, and statutes of limitations. William and Mary Law Review, 50, 607-666.

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October 27, 2009

Improve student learning by encouraging distributed practice

Distributed learning is more effective than massed learning. This observation is one of the oldest and best-documented characteristics of learning. Massed practice can be effective for improving performance on an immediate retention task, but distributed practice produces learning that endures over longer retention intervals. Unfortunately, testing material immediately following completion of a module of instruction rewards students for cramming and other massed-practice study strategies. Create situations in which students must retrieve and use newly-learned material repeatedly and following multiple intervals of time. These distributed experiences with the material will produce more enduring learning.

An added advantage of distributed practice is that the context of successive practice sessions is likely to vary over time. Use of material in a variety of contexts improves the chances that students will recall and be able to use this material in a future novel context. If the goal is to produce learning that transfers beyond the classroom to new situations, creating distributed learning and varied practice contexts will improve the success of this type of transfer.

Based on:

Matlin, M. (2007). How cognitive psychology can enhance your students’ learning. In S. A. Meyers & J. R. Stowell (Eds.), Essays from E-xcellence in Teaching (Chapter 9), Volume 7.
E-book retrieved from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology Web site:
http://teachpsych.org/ebooks/eit2007/index.php#.UbifxfnVAk0

October 20, 2009

Encourage students to evaluate the quality of information sources

One strategy to use to encourage students to evaluate the quality of sources located in a data base search for an annotated bibliography is to require that students locate a larger number of potential scholarly sources for their annotated bibliography than will be required as the “minimum” number of scholarly sources cited in the final paper. Additionally, you might require that each student identify 2-3 sources that they initially thought would be useful sources for the project but later decided that the sources were not relevant or were not useful. Ask students to explain in their annotated bibliography why the rejected source looked promising at first and then explain why the source was ultimately rejected as a suitable source.

When students identify and examine more materials than they are required to include in the final submission, they can break away from the habit of including every source they locate to meet minimum resource requirements for an assignment. Students can then begin to evaluate the merit of including these materials as cited sources. These decisions are an important component of the scholarly evaluation of source material.

October 14, 2009

Improve student learning by calibrating metacognition: The price of overconfidence

Students are typically overconfident about the level of knowledge or understanding they have achieved. This overconfidence is produced in part by the fact that students usually evaluate their knowledge or understanding immediately after completing a reading, hearing presentation of material in lecture, or at the conclusion of a bout of study (usually the night before an exam!) when representations of new information in immediate memory are quite strong. Student confidence in their learning will be inflated because they have easy access to information in immediate memory as well as long-term representations. The ease of retrieving relevant information from immediate memory distorts our confidence in our ability to recall this information at a later time. However, after a short interval of time passes without thinking about new material, the representations in immediate memory are replaced with current thoughts and concerns. All a student has left is the quality of long-term representations. Encourage students to evaluate their learning after some time has passed to get more accurate information about the adequacy of their studying.

October 6, 2009

Human factors in the classroom: Minimizing problems created by inadvertent multitasking associated with PowerPoint

In spite of popular media depictions and their own proclaimed competence, students are not as adept at multitasking as they believe. Divided attention has costs for the quality of student learning. Classroom situations can create unintended divided attention conditions that interfere with student learning. For example, PowerPoint presentations can create a variety of challenges to effective note-taking:

• When instructors use PowerPoint instead of using a blackboard to write key concepts for students, they no longer pause during lectures while they write notes on a blackboard (an activity that slows lecture presentations and creates down time for students to write). As a result, the presentation of content may be accelerated and students might not have adequate time to make appropriate notes.

• When an instructor presents a complex PowerPoint slide and lectures about content not present on the slide, students are required to multitask to process slide and lecture content. If students do not have access to the slides in advance of class, they must divide their attention between reading the presentation slides and making notes on their content, listening to the instructor talk about the slides, and making notes on this additional content. If students have the PowerPoint bullets in a handout or electronic copy of the presentation slides at the time the slides are used in class, they need not write down the bullet items and can focus entirely on taking notes on the new information provided during class.

Instructors can help students manage the task of taking effective notes on PowerPoint presentations by providing a minimalist version of their slides before class.  Posting a minimalist version of slides rather than the detailed slides used during class also creates an incentive for students to attend class. Remember to provide enough time during the lecture to allow students to complete their notes on one topic before moving on to the next.

Based on:

Matlin, M. (2007). How cognitive psychology can enhance your students’ learning. In S. A. Meyers & J. R. Stowell (Eds.), Essays from E-xcellence in Teaching (Chapter 9), Volume 7.
E-book retrieved from the Society for the Teaching of Psychology Web site:
http://teachpsych.org/ebooks/eit2007/index.php#.UbifxfnVAk0

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September 29, 2009

Promote Academic Integrity by Leading by Example

Citation practices vary considerably from discipline to discipline. Remember that students may be encountering the scholarship practices in your discipline for the first time when they are enrolled in your course. Moreover, they may bring a variety of scholarship and citation practices from other disciplines (with different traditions and expectations) when they enter your course.

Help students learn discipline-specific scholarship and citation skills by providing explicit examples of these practices in your handouts and other course materials. Follow the editorial guidelines for citation of sources when you identify reading materials in your syllabus. Similarly, use appropriate citations and publication formats in your class handouts. These materials will serve as models for your students when they are preparing their work for you.

September 22, 2009

Teach students to write by teaching them to use feedback about writing quality

Faculty mentoring upper level students and graduate students may be disappointed in the quality of students writing. How can we develop student skill with writing?

As professionals in our disciplines, we have learned to revise our writing in response to the comments and requests for revision provided by editors and reviewers. In contrast, students seldom get much practice revising their writing in response to feedback. It is easy to forget that we once needed guidance about this aspect of writing. Students need to learn how to use the feedback provided by a reviewer (in this case, their instructor). Moreover, too much feedback at once (related to spelling, punctuation, grammar, organization, supporting ideas with evidence, and other issues) can leave a student feeling overwhelmed.

An effective way to improve student skill with revision of their writing is to provide feedback on only one type of problem at a time. For example, early feedback might ignore technical problems and focus on a single large issue such as organizing ideas in a logical sequence or supporting assertions with evidence. When providing limited feedback, clearly indicate that the feedback deliberately focuses on only one type of problem and that other writing or content issues will be addressed in later drafts. For detailed feedback on mechanics (e.g., grammar, editorial style, spelling), limit feedback to only one or two pages of a draft. This strategy eliminates the temptation for students to treat comments on mechanics as copy editing and will encourage them to use the feedback to correct the entire draft and guide future writing.

This technique is most effective when working with a single student on a large project like a thesis, in which the student expects to submit multiple drafts before completing the project.  However, a variation of this technique can be used in classes in which students write several short essays. On the first assignment, students receive feedback on a writing issue without penalty. Subsequent writing assignments should reflect learning from this feedback and will be penalized for errors related to this writing issue. Grading across a series of essays might take the following form:

• Identify a problem on Essay #1 but don't take points off for the issue on this essay. Take points off if that issue appears as a problem again in subsequent essays. 
• Comment on a different problem in Essay #2 but don't take points off for that issue.  Take points off if writing on subsequent essays includes problems with either of the issues addressed in the first two essays.
• Students are held responsible for all components of writing in the final essay.

In this system students are given feedback in doses that don't overwhelm them. Although initial feedback carries no penalties for the student, the instructor attaches consequences to the feedback on future assignments so that the student will attend to the feedback in future writing.

Thanks to Dr. Ken Steele, Department of Psychology, Appalachian State University for this suggestion.

September 15, 2009

Create Activities that Encourage Deep Processing and Improve Student Learning

Deep processing tasks produce memories for new information that are more enduring than does shallow or surface learning. This effect is well-documented in the cognitive research literature (Roediger, Gallo, & Geraci, 2002). Instructors can encourage students to engage in deep processing by creating learning tasks that can be completed only if students engage in deeper processing.

Examples of tasks that induce deeper processing include the following:

• Students describe how a concept or other material in the course might apply to them, a member of their family, their friends, or some real-life setting.
• Require students to write a paraphrase of the content of reading material or a section of lecture using their own words. This can be done by assigning a minute paper or other short writing exercise in class following a discussion of this material. This assignment also gives students immediate feedback on the quality of their understanding of the material and helps calibrate self-evaluations of learning.
• Students generate a novel example of a concept presented in text or lecture.
• Ask students to describe how concepts in the current class are related to material or concepts discussed in other classes in the discipline.

Roediger, H. L., III, Gallo, D. A., & Geraci, L. (2002). Processing approaches to cognition: The impetus from the levels-of-processing framework. Memory, 10, 319-332.

September 8, 2009

Who are these new students?

Every August, Ron Nief and Tom McBride compile and publish the Beloit College Mindset List, in which they identify key cultural experiences and current events that characterize the life experiences and “mindset” of students we will meet in our classes as entering students this fall. As Nief and McBride note on their web site, this list is a helpful reminder of the sometimes dramatic differences between the life experience and cultural expectations of entering students and faculty. Advances in technology and popular culture can create divisions between generations that can impair effective communication. Knowing about these generational differences can help faculty better understand why some examples and cultural references that worked perfectly well a few years ago now draw puzzled looks or glazed expressions.

Access the current Beloit College Mindset List at the following URL:
http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/

Note: The topic of the October 16 Faculty Friday will be Generations in the Classroom: Characteristics of New Students and Strategies to Promote Classroom Civility. Join colleagues for lunch and a discussion of strategies for coping with generational differences in the classroom.

September 1, 2009

Improving teaching through peer mentoring: Teaching Partners Program

An effective practice to improve teaching is to engage in informed reflection on one’s teaching practices. Faculty can obtain useful information about practices that work well in their classrooms and suggestions about areas that might need attention by asking a peer to visit their classroom and observe their teaching.

The Teaching Partners Program allows faculty to identify a peer partner to engage in mutual classroom observations. The process benefits the person doing the observation, who might observe and learn about a new classroom strategy, and the person whose teaching is observed.

For more information about peer observation and the Teaching Partners Program, visit the following URL:
http://uwf.edu/cutla/teaching_partners.cfm

Now in its second year, the Teaching Partners Program is open to faculty in all three colleges. Participants in the first year were pleased with the experience and collegial discussions of teaching. If you are interested in participating in the Teaching Partners Program this year, please plan to attend the organizational meeting at noon on Thursday, September 3, 2009 in the University Commons, Nautilus Chamber, Room 255.

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August 25, 2009

Setting the tone for your class: Guiding students toward effective study strategies

Use class time during the first week of the term to provide students with guidelines and suggestions for successful study strategies. Examples of study discussion topics included the following:

• How to take notes effectively while reading the required text or during class meetings
• The importance of supplementing bullet headings in class PowerPoint slides with additional information provided during class or found in relevant assigned readings
• How to form an effective study group – rules for cooperation (focus on study, not socializing; quizzing one another; comparing notes from lecture, reading, peer review, etc.)
• How to prepare for exams. Karpicke, Butler, & Roediger (2009) report that students hold false beliefs about the effectiveness of various study strategies. Many students believe that reading the chapter several times is a good study strategy, but in actuality, this strategy is ineffective. Students will make better use of their study time if they use it for more effective study activities such as developing and answering questions they can expect to see on the exam, writing paraphrases of concepts in their own words and checking these against the reading or to another student’s interpretation to ensure that the paraphrase captures the intended meaning correctly. Encourage students to use more effective strategies when they study.

Karpicke, J. D., Butler, A. C., & Roediger, III, H. L. (2009). Metacognitive strategies in student learning: Do students practice retrieval when they study on their own? Memory, 17, 471-479.

August 20, 2009

Developing information literacy skills

Are you planning to include an assignment in your class that requires a search for relevant resources in the scholarly literature? When students have a large writing assignment or research-based project, they frequently make the error of procrastinating and begin their search for relevant sources too late in the term. In their rush to find suitable materials, students may cut corners and use inappropriate materials or, worse, use materials inappropriately. In addition, many students tend to carry out a search in Google (and the “wiser” students search using Google Scholar).

Consider scheduling a classroom workshop with a Reference Librarian in your discipline to develop student skills searching relevant databases for disciplinary scholarly resources, identify appropriate scholarly sources, and evaluate the quality of information located on web sites. Create an assignment connected to the workshop such as developing an annotated bibliography on the assignment topic as a prompt to begin a large research/writing project early in the term. Creating a series of preliminary assignments related to these projects also serves as a deterrent to problems such as submitting a literature review paper found on a web site.

August 11, 2009

Planning a course syllabus to adapt to emergencies

Hurricane season reaches its peak during the first half of the fall term. Many instructors on the Gulf Coast plan their course calendars to accommodate a potential “hurricane day” much as instructors in other regions make contingency plans for “snow days.” Another incentive to make contingency plans for emergencies is the current concern over the emergence of a contagious illness that might limit face-to-face interactions (such as the H1N1 virus).

The UWF emergency planning team has created guidelines for contingency plan in the event of a campus closure or limited operation associated with inclement weather or a pandemic. Consult these guidelines (http://uwfemergency.org/) for planning information that could be included in your syllabus.

The Syllabus Construction page (http://uwf.edu/cutla/frs-syllabus.cfm) provides suggested language for the syllabus that refers students to sources of official information and describes various contingency plans that faculty might implement for ensuring continuity of courses following an emergency.

The following language can be added to a syllabus to inform students about how information about campus emergencies will be disseminated:

Official Emergency Information

• WUWF-FM (88.1 MHz) is the official information source for the university. Any pertinent information regarding closings, cancellations, and the re-opening of campus will be broadcast.
• In the event that hurricane preparation procedures are initiated, the UWF Home Web Page and MyUWF will both provide current information regarding hurricane preparations procedures, the status of classes, and the closing of the university.

Information about hurricane preparedness plans is available on the UWF web site:
http://uwfemergency.org/hurricaneprep.cfm

Information about other emergency procedures is available on the UWF web site:
http://uwfemergency.org/

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Updated 04/23/12 cdw